The last living student of Joaquín Torres-García, Monette Guermont (born in 1925) developed an abstract and demanding body of work from the early 1970s onwards, deeply rooted in matter, earth and the experience of the world.
Having grown up between Europe and South America, the artist moved to Paris in 1960 and gradually incorporated raw materials (brick, coal, slate) into her painting, expressing a sensual relationship with the earth and the landscapes of Argentina and Uruguay. From the materialist canvases of the 1970s to the ‘Réseaux’ (Networks) criss-crossed with strings that appeared at the end of that decade, then to the incised alphabets and archaic signs of the late 1980s, her work evolved towards a more ethereal and meditative form. Exhibited in France and internationally in the 1970s and 1980s, Monette Guermont gradually withdrew from the art world, without ever ceasing to create.
Her powerful and silent work carries within it the radicalism of a commitment perfectly anticipated in 1978 by the writer Pierre-Jean Rémy: ‘Monette Guermont overwhelms us. A digger of reality, she forces us to face the formidable, to reject illusion. (...) She, a craftsman of truth, says no to us.’