PROVENANCE
Galerie Malingue, Paris
Importants tableaux contemporains, Ader Tajan, March 28, 1990, lot 20
Private Collection, Italy
Post-War and Contemporary, Christie’s London, February 6, 2003, lot 619
Art Contemporain 1, Artcurial, May 30, 2012, lot 53
A Prominent European Private Collection

LITERATURE
Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 3, 1960 – 1965, 2009, reproduced page 87, catalogue #1960.030H.1959-1960

EXHIBITED
Tornabuoni Arte, Florence, Maestri moderni e contemporeani, 2012

Sans titre is a jewel-like expression of Jean Paul Riopelle’s late-1950s experimentation with new approaches to painting, springing from his kaleidoscopic “mosaic” period. The work bears Riopelle’s characteristic thickly applied impasto, squeezed directly from paint tubes onto the canvas and pressed with a spatula or palette knife, creating a sculptural relief of vibrant colours. Riopelle embraced this technique in the early 1950s, when he was on the cusp of achieving international renown, because it allowed him to paint purely from intuition: the palette knife, pressed down from above, obscured the results of his gestures from his field of vision, allowing him to relinquish conscious control over any aspect of the composition. He called this process hazard total (“absolute or total chance”), distinguishing it from the automatist practices of the Surrealists and the Quebec Automatistes, whose philosophies had been fundamental to his formative years as an artist.

Since the 1940s, Riopelle had been consumed by what he saw as the necessity of vanquishing the self and all subjectivity from the act of painting. Interestingly, his earliest artistic training was rigorously academic, focused on literal representation of what the eye could see. His first instructor, Henri Bisson, derided even the Impressionists for their lack of realism. It was not until his young adulthood, studying at the École du meuble, that Riopelle met Paul-Émile Borduas, a leading figure in avant-garde artistic circles who transformed his thinking and practice. Borduas taught an initially reluctant Riopelle to appreciate Matisse and van Gogh, gradually becoming his mentor. By 1945, Riopelle had joined Borduas’s Automatiste movement, renouncing all preconceived ideas in favour of pure impulse to spark the creative process.

Within a few short years, Riopelle had attracted the attention of André Breton and the Surrealists in Paris. Yet Riopelle pushed further, concerned that Automatism had become a prescriptive “recipe” for creative production, generating predictable outcomes. Total chance banished all conscious decision-making from the act of painting, galvanizing his creative expression. “When I hesitate, I don’t paint; when I paint, I don’t hesitate! If I stop to catch my breath, if I hesitate on the choice of colours or tools, if I back up to see where I am, bang! I stop, right away,” Riopelle declared.[1]

The result was the explosive, lyrical, intensely pigmented mosaic works that critics at the time often compared to the paintings of American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. Prisms of colour burst across the canvas with energetic force, given structure by webs of sculptural tesserae formed with the spatula and palette knife, reminiscent of Byzantine mosaics. Yet despite his critical and commercial success, Riopelle continued to innovate, experimenting with chromatic modulations and textures, using the spatula to create variations in the impasto that open up areas of the painting’s surface, in contrast with his characteristically tight application of paint. Detached forms begin to emerge from light ground.[2]

By 1960, the mosaic paintings had disappeared almost completely, which positions Sans titre at a transformative moment in Riopelle’s development. Executed in exquisite tones of red, mauve and sapphire blue, Sans titre, from 1959 – 1960, is clearly rooted in the mosaic period and yet it explores fresh territory. The composition is remarkable for the tension it achieves between competing tendencies of tightness and openness: areas of smoothly applied paint recede like a backdrop, akin to a sunset sky, while the textured sculptures of the tesserae surge into the foreground, suspended in space, their cool linearity in the right half of the composition contrasting with their swirling movement in reds dominating the left. Forms collide and fragment, wheeling and darting in unpredictable rhythms. These diffuse compositional elements are grounded by an expanse of black running through the centre of the canvas, functioning like a horizon line and hinting at representational form. Sans titre is a testament to the creative process, demonstrating the inner restlessness and drive to innovate that always infuses Riopelle’s best work with the suggestion of new possibilities.

1. Quoted in François-Marc Gagnon, Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), 127.

2. Guy Robert, Riopelle, chasseur d’images (Montreal: Éditions France-Amérique, 1981), 83.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars