Sold for: $61,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie Albert Loeb, Paris
Galerie Dresdnere, Toronto
Private Collection, Quebec

LITERATURE
Henri Belbéoch and Florence Clifford, Belle-Île en art, 1991, page 168
Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1, 1939 - 1953, 1999, page 40, reproduced page 301 and listed page 417, catalogue #1952.001P.1952

Sans titre is similar to Pavés, also from 1952 and lot 2 in this sale, but dives more deeply into a richness of colour and materiality in its network of black blobs and lines. It illustrates Jean Paul Riopelle’s inventiveness in exploring variations on a theme alongside his awareness of how spatial structure changes with a different emphasis on the elements of this painting. With more black blobs and lines, the painting becomes more dense and is pulled more strongly to the front – with the colours glimmering below like a stained-glass window. One senses a certain passion in the work in its intensity.

As the art critic Michel Waldberg wrote, “From the very beginning, Riopelle’s painting struck me as providing an extremely formalist basis for a maze of trajectories and a system of switches, far less erratic than they may at first appear. For what is remarkable in Riopelle’s painting is the extreme soundness of its structuring.” Thus Sans titre, abstract and seemingly intuitive, relating to its surrealist roots, is a masterful pulling together of its autonomous elements into a supreme moment of gestalt.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars