Jean-Paul Riopelle 1923 - 2002

Riopelle, Paintings from the fifties, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1989, no. 10

Jean Paul Riopelle d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1990, no. 13

Riopelle 67, Musée du Québec, 1967, p. 30, reproduced in colour as Composition 1955

Yseult Riopelle, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Catalogue Raisonné: Tome 2, 1954 - 1959, Switzerland/Montreal, 2004, p. 186, no. 1954.072H.1954, reproduced in colour

For the large National Gallery of Canada exhibition of Riopelle's work in 1962, which travelled on to Montreal and Toronto, a number of scholars wrote analyses and tributes to Riopelle's work. These included Franco Russoli, Guy Viau, Pierre Schneider, and Russell Harper. In writing about the evolution of the painter's style up to that point, Harper was quite clear about the work of 1953 and 1954:

The works best known to most Canadians began to emerge in 1953. These seem to have originated when Riopelle flattened out with his palette knife some of the rebellious blobs of paint squeezed from the tube. His use of the knife increased steadily. Soon the whole surface became a modelled mosaic of flat colour areas, skillfully laced together to give an exhilarating sensation both of romantic colour harmonies and light vibration. Great variety came through juxtaposition of pure colours. The surface assumed a tactile, three-dimensional effect. Looked at for some time, the flat tapestry-like surface disappears, and slowly the ensemble becomes animated, the colour planes take life, sliding, inclining and overlapping one into the other, composing spatial relations both complex and with infinite subtleties.

But landscape was not abandoned. Sometimes green walls with occasional light touches simulated the impenetrable forest pierced by feeble shafts of light. Sunsets and sunlit vistas are broken into tingling prisms. Each facet of the Alpine glacier is broken up. The technique was exacting but the task was set about with such zest that each painting was completed at a single session.

Guy Viau, who knew the artist well from the outset of his career, wrote of his work:

For Riopelle and his colleagues Automatisme was only a method, a means of sweeping away conventional attitudes in order to express freely their intution of nature. There is not one canvas of Riopelle's that does not convey the exuberant rhythms evoking natural disturbances, geological formations, topography of cities and landscapes, or the tangle of the forest.

This pristine 1954 painting, with all its subtle, myriad colours, has the pedigree of Riopelle during the few years of his peak of achievement. The quantity of his production that year was not as great as it later would be, but the quality of what he did paint during that magical year was unsurpassed.

© Estate of Jean-Paul Riopelle / SODRAC (2011)