The art of Hector Saunier

The art of Hector Saunier celebrates the expressive power of line, texture, space, and colour. His prints demonstrate a unique aesthetic sensibility and creative powers of the highest order. He is a master of the engraved line, a refined engraver and an unparalleled, technically innovative printer who can play with coloured inks like a virtuoso musician plays with harmonies. This technical virtuosity is coupled with an abstract visual imagination that allows him to create the beauty and mystery of irrational colour spaces that evoke, even transcend, ordinary experience.

​

Born in Argentina in 1936, Saunier came to Europe in 1961 and began working with the great experimental artist and printmaker Stanley William Hayter at the renowned Atelier 17 in Paris in 1966. Since its inception in the late 1920s, Atelier 17 has been the centre of intaglio printmaking in the 20th century. Saunier learned his craft primarily from Hayter, who quickly recognised his talents. He became an assistant at the Atelier and worked closely with Hayter for the next twenty years. In 1978, he became associate director of the Atelier, taking over as director during Hayter's absences. When Hayter died in 1988, Saunier became co-director of the Atelier, now renamed Atelier Contrepoint, which still thrives at 10 rue Didot in Paris.

​

It was at Atelier 17 that simultaneous polychrome printing techniques, capitalising on the differential viscosities of inks, were invented by Hayter and his associates in the 1940s. These methods, which developed over the years, allowed the creation of a polychrome print directly on the plate, and thus the development of the image in immediate interaction with the support. They have also made it possible to fully integrate form and colour into the creative process. Finally, they opened up an unprecedented range of colour effects that could be achieved in the hands of a master. Saunier quickly became a master of colour and its creative possibilities in intaglio printing. He continued to experiment with simultaneous polychromy and, since Hayter's death, has made discoveries of previously unsuspected sophistication and subtlety. These are evident in the brilliantly coloured images he has produced, images that reveal not the beauties of nature, but the beauties imagined by a rich and refined creative imagination.

​

Saunier's engraved line is bold and dramatic, swirling and weaving in and out of space, swelling and shrinking, penetrating deep into the plane, twisting and returning to the surface. It has an autonomous expressive power of movement, plasticity, and elegance. Sometimes the device of a white halo is used to give it even more brilliance and volume. A deeply etched white line ("gaufrage") that lies above the picture plane is sometimes used to give more depth to the imagery. Beautifully woven networks of lines animate the colour spaces. Open bite etching, soft ground texturing, and masks during inking are used to create multiple image planes, receding depths and overlapping or interpenetrating irrational planes.

​

His imagery is not linked to surrealism, but his creative procedures are to a large extent in line with the surrealist conception of the automaton, unconscious sources of creative inspiration. His work on the plate is largely intuitive, encouraging the free play of the imagination and using unintended consequences and even accidents in the application of the sequential processes involved. He draws on the unconscious imaginative resources of image-making, seeking a balance between spontaneity and reflective analysis.

​

It is above all in his mastery of the mysteries of colour that Saunier stands out today as unique among living printmakers. His sensitivity to colour is unequalled among contemporary printmakers, and his ability to impart atmosphere and drama through colour and irrational spatial structures is truly astonishing. He contrasts gradations of colour with each other to create forms of counterpoint that can complement or oppose the counterpoint of geometric forms. In this way, it is possible to create new colour spaces and beautiful spatial progressions and regressions. The bright white of the paper is often used as a source of light in the image itself, which can glow as brightly as the fluorescent colours that Saunier so often uses in intaglio. The artist plays not only with colour in his images but also with light itself.

Looking at Saunier's work over the last thirty years, one realises that he can orchestrate space, line, and colour into an abstract form with the imagination and subtlety of a great composer. The range of colour harmonies and dissonances is extraordinary, from the quiet tones of soft, tender blues, greys, and pinks to the dazzling dramatic effects of a fiery red-orange standing out against the green and yellow like a trumpet fanfare. As Hayter said of him, he "not only creates a space of the imagination beyond our normal experience but involves us in another dimension of awareness of colour itself - making us aware of the unsuspected amplitude of one of the most joyful aspects of life".

​

P.M.S. HACKER

St John's College, Oxford

​