Giant canvas with squares and a shaped canvas in the shape of a cross showed Olivier Mosset in 1990 with me. Huge canvases measuring 5 meters wide and 2 meters high filled the gallery space in an evocative manner as if they were getting air after the transport from Brooklyn. Titles such as "Black Square", "Purple Square" and "Pink Square" suggest forms that are mentioned in the titles. In reality there are elliptical, trapezoidal and diamond-shaped canvasses. An inverted Swiss cross of red on a white background is hung in a tilted manner, making a St. Andrew's cross. The tight manner of painting in which these 'shaped canvasses' are painted creates a group of works that can be described as sizzling 'hard edge paintings', due to their bright color contrasts.
Olivier Mosset makes art and yet he does not want to make art. This may explain why he prefers to limit himself not only to unmanageably large canvas formats, but also to limit his choices to simple solid surfaces and existing signs such as a star shape, an 'Exit' sign or an enlarged and flat dollar sign. It is as if the manifesto of the BMPT-group from 1968 still resounds in his paintings.