Sold for: $145,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie Jacques Dubourg, Paris
Arthur Tooth & Sons, London
Corporate Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Georges Duthuit, Riopelle: First American Exhibition, Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1954, unpaginated
Arthur Tooth & Sons, Jean Paul Riopelle: Recent Paintings, 1963, listed and reproduced, unpaginated
Gilles Vigneault et al., Jean-Paul Riopelle, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1991, page 35

EXHIBITED
Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, Jean Paul Riopelle: Recent Paintings, 1963, catalogue #19

By 1962 the dense mosaics of Jean Paul Riopelle’s 1950s paintings had broken up, and space, in the form of slabs of white, was entering not just the inside of his paintings, crowded with gestural chunks and lines, but also from the sides. These slabs are streaked with lines of colour, giving them dimension - but rather than being just empty space, Harry Bellet wrote that they became “an area of calm, ample and solid, where the eye can rest from the surrounding upheaval.” Around this calm, Riopelle’s gestural, passionate movements of the knife create a frenzied field of painterly action going off in all directions. One senses an internal drama, not one connected to any object or event, but something of pure intuition arising from the unconscious. Riopelle would work until the painting was finished, as Georges Duthuit so poetically wrote, “in a kind of vertiginous rapture, invested from all sides at once and with no other guide than the feeling that somehow or other it will be accomplished. The essential is not to recover consciousness.” Riopelle’s brilliance is that he takes us into that experience with him.

This work is included as an addendum in Yseult Riopelle’s online catalogue raisonné on the artist’s work at http://www.riopelle.ca.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars