Jean-Paul Riopelle

Galerie Jacques Dubourg, Paris
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Sale: Christie's, New York. Post-War and Contemporary Art, 15 May 2003, Lot 139
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Vie des Arts, Montreal 1961, p. 51, no. 24
Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, 1954-1959, Vol. II, Montreal 2004, p. 242, no. 1956.100H, illustrated in colour

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"There is no abstraction nor is there representation: there is only expression, and to express oneself is to look at things and face them. To abstract means to remove, to isolate, to separate, while my aim, on the contrary, is to add, to draw near, to bind." Jean-Paul Riopelle

Born in Montreal in 1923, Jean-Paul Riopelle was one of the 20th century's most original and visionary artists. His career began within Canada's 'Les Automatistes' - a group of Québécois artists whose work was influenced by the Surrealist theory of gestural automatism - and Riopelle's formative work from this period was inspired by a growing awareness of the vitality and transcience of the natural world around him in Canada's vast wilderness. It was these characteristics that flourished in his work following his fecund emigration to live and work within the more creatively fertile environment of the 'Ecole de Paris' in 1949.

This outstanding masterpiece, Puit de Lumière, dates from the most significant years of the artist's mature career in the French capital. Painted shortly after he had embarked upon a rich yet tempestuous relationship with his long-term confidante, the Abstract Expressionist artist Joan Mitchell, the thickly textured, rippling surface of the present lot shifts through a kaleidoscopic display of contrasting, inter-woven colours, exhibiting the full technical mastery and the supreme creative confidence of Riopelle's unique, gestural expressionism.

The gloriously vibrant and suggestive riot of colour that Riopelle manifests here attests to the timeless grandeur and simplicity of truly great art. As the work's title suggests, the artist recalls in paint the radiant aura of an illuminated stained glass window. In so doing he points to the sublime vitality of nature as his point of reference. "My source of inspiration," Riopelle mused, "is Nature. I'm telling you, I am very representational." (the artist cited in: Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné 1939-1953, Vol. I, Montreal 1999, p. 45) Nature's essence, in all its vibrant flux, is superbly captured by Riopelle in this exuberant, joyful "grand mosaic" of paint. Using the palette knife as his brush, Riopelle energises the paint surface into a storm of colourful plumes whose undulating, animated accents almost seem to come alive as they jostle and coalesce with one another. Yet for all the energy contained within the busy and layered marks of the all-over composition, the world Riopelle creates before the viewer's darting gaze is one of overriding equilibrium with every drip of paint and every line of colour as if precisely placed onto the canvas.

In this painterly celebration of the beauty and energy within life's colourful extremes, Riopelle emerges as the true master of his medium. The juxtaposed combination of order and chaos, in which overflowing, spontaneous gestures are balanced within a larger, harmonious whole, epitomises the existential struggle between man and his surrounding natural environment. Extending the early 20^th tradition of natural abstraction, of Monet, Mondrian and Klee, and adding to it the gestural expressive power of the New York and Parisian schools, Riopelle's Puit de Lumière affords a unique and spiritual investigation into the mysteries of the natural world in which we reside.