Sold for: $31,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie du Siècle, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal

Icarus was the legendary son of craftsman Daedalus whose escape from the island of Crete became famously tragic. Daedalus constructed wings of wax and feathers and warned his son to fly neither too low nor too high. Overcome by the sheer thrill of flying and ignoring his father’s warnings, Icarus flew too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax off the wings, which fell apart. He plummeted to the sea and drowned. In Le vol d'Icare (Icarus’s Flight), Lise Gervais brilliantly translates the myth’s thrilling apex and its fateful moral in this dramatic composition. Swatches of glossy black and vibrant orange-red are laid onto the canvas using the palette knife. The roundish shapes and contrastingly sharp, vertical ones seem to emerge from the white impastoed background. The dynamic composition is taut with the intuitive energy of the Automatist touch. Although too young to be a signatory of the group’s 1948 Refus global manifesto, Gervais was a devotee of the Automatist movement. The group’s expressive approach to texture especially appealed to her personal interest in the materiality of her medium.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars