Review by Elâ Atakan

The Merchant House, Your House
André Stempfel
12 December – 28 Feburary
The Merchant House
Herengracht 254
1016 BV Amsterdam

The Joy of Yellow
On André Stempfel’s Practice

The exhibition André Stempfel: The Merchant House, Your House, unfolds through a scenography conceived by curator and Founding Artistic Director Marsha Plotnitsky, inviting the visitor not into a conventional exhibition space, but into a space akin to a house. The venue is conceived as a space inhabited by the works themselves, at The Merchant House Gallery. Stempfel’s emblematic yellow paintings, his sculptures animated by a sense of movement, and the sky-blue sofa, a recurring motif in his practice, together compose a domestic and familiar atmosphere. The exhibition thus places the viewer less in the position of a visitor than in that of a guest, wandering through the artist’s house-studio.

Born in 1930 in Villeurbanne, André Stempfel developed, over the course of his long career, a practice situated at the boundary between painting and sculpture. Rather than providing answers, his work raises questions about form, space, surface, and the third dimension. These inquiries never take the form of grand demonstrative gestures, but instead manifest through slight displacements, subtle deformations, and unexpected passages, which Stempfel himself refers to by the term clinamen.* Distinguishing himself from his contemporaries without ever opposing them head-on, his work has nevertheless never renounced a dimension of joy and humour.

Stempfel’s artistic training began in Lyon, where he was introduced to painting at an academy run by a pupil of Albert Gleizes, whom he met on several occasions. After his family moved to Grenoble, he continued his studies at the city’s art school and university. In 1955, he travelled to Italy and then spent an extended period in Greece, where he produced numerous drawings and deepened his research into space and light, nourished by the ancient environment. In 1958, he settled in Paris, worked at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and gradually developed his personal visual language. In 1959, his works were selected for the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, of which he would later become a jury member; in 1960, he was permanently represented by the Galerie d’Art du Faubourg (Étienne Pépin). During this period, he also frequented Parisian intellectual circles.

After the studio fire, 1970, Paris.

In 1970, a fire devastated his Paris studio and destroyed almost all of his earlier works. At the age of forty, Stempfel experienced a decisive rupture, both material and artistic. To this loss was added a period of illness that the artist describes as “very difficult.” The dark and romantic paintings of his early years gradually gave way to an opening toward colour. “Little by little, I moved toward colour… and then there was that fire.”

From this rupture emerged what would become the signature of his work: jaune Senegal. For Stempfel, this yellow is not merely a colour, but the threshold of a passage out of melancholy, the visual expression of a state of mind that is “very luminous, very joyful, very positive.” As he puts it, “If, for Yves Klein, blue is infinite space, I prefer to throw myself into light.” This yellow, imbued with humour, love, and silence, becomes an essential tool, present by definition throughout his entire body of work.

From that point onward, Stempfel conceives the monochrome not as an end, but as a point of departure. “The monochrome is a model for me,” he states, “not a landscape or an object.” The yellow surface then comes alive through small or large displacements. It may lift slightly, reveal blue squares in the background, or slide toward volume. “I understood that a yellow occupying the entire canvas brought more joy and light than a painting composed of many colours.”

In this process of reconstruction, Stempfel’s relationship to space is profoundly transformed. He is first rehoused at the Cité des Arts in Paris, before obtaining a studio from the City of Paris, where he still works today. He describes this period as “almost salvatory.” “I then received my first commissions for monumental art. I had a mosaic and a bas-relief to realise. It saved me somewhat, because I had concrete work to do.” Turning toward monumental art does not signify only a change of scale, but also a simplification of the mode of thought. “In monumental art, one is obliged to do simpler things. It is another way of thinking.” This constraint nourishes and deepens the minimal impulse already present in his work, making the relationships between form, surface, and movement more legible. Gradually, the monumental scale becomes both a material support for his practice and the foundation of a new dialogue with space.

Stempfel’s relationship to minimalism and geometric abstraction is thus one of both proximity and distance. He feels closer to minimalism than to pure geometry, which he perceives as a search for closure and definitive perfection. “I started from there,” he explains, “but instead of closing the space of the painting, I opened it. I introduced a slightly fanciful gesture into a very simple form.” For him, the minimal form is never an endpoint, but a structure open to intervention.

This position is also evident in his involvement with the international MADI collective, which he joined in 1980 and remained part of until 1997. Rather than adopting its rules or manifesto, Stempfel saw it as a field of energy and freedom, a space in which to displace geometry, push form beyond its frame, and allow movement to infiltrate structure.

For Stempfel, a painting is constructed first mentally. “I make the painting first in my head,” he says, often working on several works simultaneously. The process rests on a long phase of preparation involving drawings, trials, and technical calculations. He uses electric saws, rasps, and clamps, to the point of comparing his studio to “a carpentry workshop rather than a painter’s studio.” While an idea may arise while sitting on a bench in a public square, it is always in the studio that it takes form.

Dividing his life between Paris and the South of France, Stempfel now works between his studio in the 13th arrondissement of Paris and his studio in Avignon. Yet he refuses any landscape-based reading of his work. “The landscapes of the Midi do not inspire me at all.” What interests him is not nature, but light, not as a motif, but as a physical and mental condition that allows colour, and yellow in particular, to vibrate and shift.

Music also occupies a singular place in his practice. The works of Ligeti or Luc Ferrari, with their play of repetition, rhythm, and slight displacements, resonate in his sculptural and pictorial series, where forms appear almost in motion. Hence the recurrence of the notions of noise and silence in the titles of his works and exhibitions. Silence is never an absence, but a field of tension traversed by vibrations.

Taken as a whole, Stempfel’s work can be read as a continuous line of thought, moving from paper to canvas, from canvas to sculpture, from intimate scale to monumental scale, and at times brushing against architecture. What defines his work is not the passage from one medium to another, but the coherence that makes these passages possible. Without ever fully aligning himself with a movement or submitting to a doctrine, Stempfel draws on the languages of minimalism, concrete art, and geometric abstraction in order to bend them. This fidelity to his own path is precisely what gives his work a constant relevance: to open rather than to close, to leave in suspension rather than to conclude, to conceive form in motion.

André Stempfel: The Merchant House, Your House thus proposes a reading of this trajectory not under the sign of retrospection, but through everyday proximity, inviting the viewer to slow down, to linger, and to inhabit the artist’s world for the duration of a visit, at The Merchant Gallery.

**Clinamen: A slight spontaneous and unpredictable deviation by which, according to Epicurus, atoms depart from their trajectory, breaking absolute determinism.
**All quotations are taken from the interview conducted with the artist on 14 December 2025 at The Merchant Gallery.

Installation views of André Stempfel’s exhibition The Merchant House, Your House, Amsterdam (NL).
Photography by Arjen Veldt.