Produced in 1970, Etude is part of the eponymous series produced by Simon Hantaï from 1969 to 1971. The works in this cycle are one of the last testimonies of the artist's production of oil paintings, which he definitively abandoned in favor of acrylics in the early 1970s.

The paintings in this series are characterized by the presence of small folds evenly distributed over the surface and covered with a single color that, after the canvas is unfolded, is divided and fragmented by an unpainted white background. For the first time in Hantaï's folded works, there is a deliberate equivalence between the painted and unpainted areas, as well as a uniformity of color that suggests an erasure of the artist's hand. In this Etude, the arrangement of black and whites provides a sense of harmony that emanates from the entire composition This Etude is in the heart of his work and in the breath of the 1970s, a period of great creativity during which he acquired a growing reputation in France, which earned him the right to represent the country at the Venice Biennale in 1982.

His deep black, his networks of folds declined to infinity and his forms at the same time floating and incised in the material resonate with the cut papers of Henri Matisse. This direct echo to the scissors of the leader of Fauvism will be confirmed a few years later when Hantaï will realize his series of Laissées. He no longer paints but cuts, sorts, assembles and recomposes his canvases in the manner of a Blue Nude.

Key figure of abstraction, Simon Hantaï produced a multiform work marked, from 1960, by the use of "folding as a method".

Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, Simon Hantaï publicly opposed the Nazi invasion in 1944, before being imprisoned and managing to escape.

An "uncompromising" artist, embodying "the freedom to paint at all costs, a project he paid a high price for by removing himself from the canvas and the artistic process and totally erasing his ego," said Anne Baldassari, "He distanced himself from virtuosity, acquired knowledge, the learned hand."

To bend is to curve, fold, crease, distort. From the 1960s, Simon Hantaï made this gesture the founding act of his creative impulse. He redefined the surface to be painted by distributing the volumes of matter differently. The canvas is now free of any rigid structure; goodbye frames, stretchers and other easels that Western artists were so fond of. The canvas is free, moving, flexible, but also uneven.

If the absence of a frame would become a major obstacle to the calculated and precise gesture of any painter, Hantaï has made it an artistic motor. Becoming at the same time support and matter, his canvas is like the clay of the sculptor: it is redefinable with the infinity. The artist modulates it in hollows and reliefs to create a completely different surface to paint.