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Exhibition Judit Reigl, Galerie de France, Paris, 2006 © photo P.H.Müller
"To protect a new parquet floor, I covered it with several layers of rejected canvases – those with marks on a white background that allowed for no correction. On these impromptu floor coverings, I worked, walked and poured pictorial matter that ran, saturated and were trampled underfoot. As time went by, these excremental rags slowly became stratified layers, like the guano that comes from the isles of Latin America. Completely ruined as paintings, they excelled in their very self-negation, becoming fertile ground. I reworked them systematically beginning in 1962. Their white background and the black writing initially there no longer existed. Depending on the layer they chanced to belong to, they were more or less saturated, encrusted or worn down, even threadbare. I came next. A final layer – white in most cases – which was immediately scraped off, leaving a streak and opaque veiling behind, a kind of “background layer,” as it were. A backwards operation."
Judit Reigl, in catalogue Judit Reigl, 1974, Maison de la Culture, Rennes
