Collages, folds, works cut with a box cutter. A constantly experimental work developed by Simon Hantaï, one of the greatest Hungarian abstract painters. A member of the surrealist circle, Hantaï turns to abstraction by discovering Pollock's action painting. In his monumental works, he uses "folding as a method": the folded canvas, sometimes knotted, is uniformly painted, then unfolded, thus revealing an alternation of coloured surfaces and unpainted reserves. While these folds reveal magnificent shades of colour, Hantaï also created them solely with black paint on white canvas, a series that the Gagosian Gallery now presents. Intertwined with bright white folds, they can evoke images of nature - an undergrowth of leaves, a flock of birds? - but are fundamentally pure abstraction. The series testifies to the artist's desire to eliminate the hand of the artist in the act of painting. His conception of the pictorial act evolves at the end of his life, when he reworks his compositions: silk-screen printing of his paintings, and knife blows inflicted on his compositions, Hantaï leaves behind a fractured corpus that invites us to question the foundations of his work.