Vendu pour : 789 750 $

PROVENANCE
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Sold sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Sotheby's London, April 5, 1990, lot 617
Private Collection, Montreal

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Yseult Riopelle, Jean-Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, Volume II, 1954 - 1959, 2004, reproduced page 187, catalogue #1954.079H.1954

As we have long been accustomed to figurative art, we often assume that even abstract art must have some connection with nature. In the dark spreading out of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s Sans titre, we could imagine some mysterious movements of unseen objects or the ripple of water on the sea at night. We are told that with an abstract painting each viewer is free to imagine what he wants. But is that so?

Could I be permitted to borrow from philosophy to clarify the problem a little? The relation to nature we are looking for when confronted by abstract art is coherent with the idea that our relation to the world is that of a subject (a self) in front of an object. This relationship could be defined as contemplative, detached, at a certain distance from reality. This is the attitude of the figurative painter pretending to “imitate” what he sees, to “copy” nature. But this is not the only place we could occupy in the world. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger gave the example of a craftsman in his workshop using his tools to produce something. He thought of a shoemaker – and in that case, the craftsman is not contemplating anything already there, but is producing something new, which could be useful or beautiful, or both.

But it strikes me that the situation Heidegger describes is very similar to the one of an artist in his studio. The painter also has his tools – in the case of Riopelle, his famous painting knives and decapitated paint tubes – and he is absorbed in what he does, forgetting the world around him, to produce something - a painting. In this case, one could say that the painter is not painting the world as he saw it, but producing a world - his own world. This is also like the craftsman, who, by producing something he could sell, advertise, improve, etc. is also creating his own world and a network of communication, different from any other.

In fact, in an artwork, we are not looking at the exterior world more or less transposed by the painter, but his inner world. We are invited to share his taste for the colour black, for an impetuous composition full of gyratory movements, for an all-over overcoming of the picture’s surface, for texture and impastos, for the juxtaposition of coloured surfaces left by the painting knife that led to Riopelle’s paintings of the 1950s being described as mosaics. By looking at his painting, we are invited to share the creative process of the painter, to share something of the innumerable decisions he had to make to organize its surface as it is. We are, therefore, not detached or at a distance. The presence of the painter is close at hand - in each stroke, in each trace he has left on the canvas.

Perceived from that point of view, Sans titre from 1954 becomes an extraordinary painting, able to give much pleasure to the onlooker. It is what we mean when we say: “This painting has a real presence on the wall.” Such is almost always the case with Riopelle’s paintings - they attract attention, as if their creator were there.

And in fact, is that not also true of great figurative painting? How could we not feel the same about that, as in the “mute poetry”, as he described it, of Nicolas Poussin’s great masterpieces, even if he claimed that they were “imitating” nature?

We thank François-Marc Gagnon of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute of Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, recent recipient of the medal of the Académie des lettres du Québec for his lifetime achievement, for contributing the above essay.

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