“My painting is not so much a question of abstraction or figuration as a system consisting in repetition of the same form,” the French artist Claude Viallat, born in 1936, told Art Media Agency in 2016. A founding member of Supports/Surfaces, a contemporary art movement that lasted from 1969 to 1971, Viallat worked to redefine the narrow bounds of painting. Alongside artists such as Vincent Bioules and Daniel Dezeuze, he experimented with shapes and colors as well as with nontraditional materials. Feeling an attack on the independence and freedom of art, Viallat and his peers aimed to deconstruct the notion that a painting must be an object. “Every day I construct infinitely different canvases, and this gives me extremely wide freedom,” he says. Templon NYC exhibits a series of 20 Viallat pieces painted between the 1960s and today. —Jeanne Malle