Executed in 1950, Flèches is a dynamic, kaleidoscopic expression of the most transformative moment in Jean Paul Riopelle’s celebrated career. Famed for elaborate works of thick impasto and chromatic intensity, Riopelle is largely associated with Lyrical Abstraction, a school that emerged out of Paris concurrently with Abstract Expressionism in New York. Flèches is dense with built up material and variegated pigment; thickly applied with a palette knife in blocks or flung across the surface to form the titular “arrows,” Riopelle’s exuberant canvas celebrates the visceral quality of paint. Narrating the height of the Canadian-born artist’s involvement in the avant-garde of postwar Paris, Flèches is further notable for its impressive provenance. Once in the collection of Henri Matisse’s son-in-law, influential art historian Georges Duthuit, the present work marks a pivotal moment in Riopelle’s history. Duthuit is credited both with inspiring Riopelle’s interest in Byzantine and Coptic art, and with coining the term “mosaic” to refer to Riopelle’s singular style of using a palette knife to apply paint directly on the surface of the canvas, giving each dab of color a sculptural character resembling the square shapes of tesserae. In its layered composition of these blocks of paint with expressive drippings and splatters of impasto, Flèches represents an important and remarkably early moment in the development of this style, that would become Riopelle’s signature mode of mark-making for decades to come.

With its vivid gemstone accents that flicker and dance across the canvas, the present work exudes the explosive energy of this era. In the aftermath of the mass upheaval of the Second World War, Paris became an artistic melting pot, attracting creatives from across the Western world. From Jackson Pollock to Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis to Ellsworth Kelly, artists, writers, musicians and thinkers flocked to the city, bringing forth one of the greatest periods of creative cross-pollination and artistic experimentation of the twentieth century. This period was critical for Riopelle; having briefly dabbled in Surrealism, he broke with figuration in 1946 and fully abandoned the paintbrush in favor of spatulas and knives by the early 1950s. Compositions once chaotic and informal became stabilized and harmonious, firmly rooted by these new colorful bits of geometry. Like Cézanne, Riopelle used these shard-like brushstrokes as a structural tool with which he could build and direct his compositions. As outlined by art historian Guy Robert: “Riopelle painted tableaux that were textured with thick pastes, applied with a brush and more and more often with a spatula, and these depths, already bubbling with colours, were then slashed in all directions by fine spurts of paint whose network constitutes a kind of jazz rhythm: jerky, syncopated, muscular” (Guy Robert, Riopelle, chasseur d’images, Montréal 1981, p. 68). This undeniable juxtaposition is evident in Flèches where the artist perfectly combines his successive knife strokes with a kind of dripping, paint splattered over the canvas. Works such as this from the early 1950s show Riopelle at his most vibrant and expressive, as he passed the threshold of achieving his own unique style of modernism.

Although his works from this period have been compared to those of Jackson Pollock, Riopelle’s approach was very different to that of the action painters. So deemed because they saw the canvas as “an arena in which to act,” Pollock and his ilk had a very direct, physical, and intuitive relationship to their painted surfaces. Pollock would famously walk onto his canvases laid out on the floor and, pouring and dripping his paint in wide gestures, would work outward from the center toward undetermined limits. Once a suitable image had been achieved, the excess canvas would be cut away – and thus the boundaries of the plane were determined. Riopelle, in stark contrast, adhered to a more traditional relationship, working with a stretched canvas on an easel as had been the practice of painters for centuries. Thus he maintained a distance from his work, allowing him a critical perspective from which to contemplate the developing image, and cognizant of the limits of his canvas in advance. In this way, Riopelle drew upon the legacy of the European masters he most admired, including Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse.

Further, Riopelle resisted the label of abstraction for his work. Traditionally, abstraction is a process of decomposition, of taking apart figures and forms until they exist in their most basic, elemental states. Instead, Riopelle described his work as a process of creation and cohesion. To him, it was the very antithesis of abstraction's fragmentation. The artist was known for executing his paintings in a hypnotic trance-like state in which each physical and emotional sensation would lead him to his next gesture, color or place on the canvas. His paintings are pulsating organisms, birthed from intense contemplation and a scientific yet instinctive understanding of the relationships between forms and colors. These web-like tapestries are not paintings of the mind, understood through analysis but rather, soulful expressions of nature to be read by pure sensorial intuition. This approach is keenly felt in the meticulously layered and balanced composition of Flèches.

With the consolidation of his active and imaginative artistic language, 1950 announced the zenith of Riopelle’s practice and mature style. Flèches offers a remarkably intricate and uniquely mesmerizing example of this practice; it is as though the warmth, energy and improvisation of this period is captured in each layer of Riopelle’s thick impasto. With numerous examples housed in major museum collections across the globe, Riopelle’s works of the early 1950s are today considered the most significant of his celebrated career.