NATURE Quadri 001

Jean-Claude ByandB is a French visual artist born in 1949 who lives and works in Saint Cyr sur Loire, France. He has published in particular Reflets & Réflexions, What is Art META Graphic and Entre Vous et Nous.

Born in 1949, Jean-Claude Byandb's artistic research was mainly influenced by the 1960s. Characterized by a feeling of both faith and anger, the 60s generated an explosion of extremely exciting and spectacular avant-garde ideologies and movements. On the one hand, the astronomical discoveries of those years impacted positively the whole world. On the other hand, they were years historically set in the context of the Cold War, largely defined by the Iron Curtain that divided Europe both physically and spiritually, and significantly marked by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

During those years, all pre-existing expectations about gender, race and justice, contested education, morality and personal identity were redefined through the civil rights movement, the second wave of feminism, and through the student political uprisings. The significant escalation of mass consumerism also defined the era, generating new trends in marketing and advertising.
With regard to the Art world, Minimalism introduced the key idea that art should have existed in its own reality and should have not imitated the real world.

With the aim of demolishing all pre-established notions about art, minimalism became a radically progressive and significant movement worldwide, with artists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin as key players. Minimalism became influential through the works of artists such as Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, while pop art was a fundamental by-product of the latter, simultaneously criticising and glorifying popular culture.

The iconic contemporary art movements that echoed in the wave of radicalism in the 1960s, also had their own features and peculiarities, based on the different regions or countries. Spatialism, for example, was established in Italy by Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, and its ideologies were later embraced by the Zero group in Germany. Throughout Europe, the ideologies of existentialism have strongly influenced artists such as Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, who have sought to represent the raw human emotions often associated with death and the disturbing anxiety of the senselessness of life.