Includes an introduction by John Yau and 'Harmony through contrasts. The Work of Jean Miotte', an essay by Karl Ruhrberg. 

Jean Miotte is one of the prominent figures of lyrical abstraction within the New School of Paris. From the outset he favored gestures and action as a means of transposing emotion, as a way of testifying to his complex relationship to sensory reality; a philosophical and spiritual experience in service of the symbolism of the image. His discourse is borne out of a semantics where he regards the sign as the “I” who paints: "I am painting" he declares. His approach tends to two extremes, on the one hand a writing at the height of thought and sensation, and jointly an exuberant spontaneity to the point of losing oneself in a Zen-like spirit. This vocation of the void was manifested especially from 1962 on, following regular stays in New York where he bonded with Rothko and Motherwell. Miotte gives praise to white that has become light, and which “radiates and erases limits”, he says. The fluid space is cut across by vigorous flat areas that extend into hemmed waves, torn to shreds in a spatial labyrinth whose complacent pitfalls it suppresses.