Vendu pour : 58 250 $

PROVENANCE
Galerie L'Art Français Ltée, Montreal
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Montreal

Trois hommes noirs sont arrivés (Three Black Men Have Arrived) is a mysterious and evocative oil on canvas by Jean Paul Lemieux. Illustrating Homo viator – man on a journey – this work suggests a greater narrative that goes beyond the boundaries of its Spartan composition. The artist’s minimalist pictorial language, adopted from the mid-1950s onward, is what makes his works so appealing. Here, a large flattened expanse of white snow extends towards a slanted horizon line, creating a dynamic diagonal in the pictorial space. The riders, rendered schematically, facing forward, give the impression of movement. The horse, one of Lemieux’s recurring subjects, symbolizes freedom in the artist’s oeuvre. Often depicted in winter landscapes, where roads or other bearings are deliberately hidden, his horses gallop in open spaces, with the horizon as the only limit. With Lemieux, the horse and rider are always leaving, always heading elsewhere. They sometimes carry messages with them, such as with the horse-riding mailman Nick Sluzick, one of Gabrielle Roy’s characters in her novel La petite poule d’eau, which Lemieux illustrated in 1981, the same year this work was produced.

This lot is accompanied by a series of commemorative stamps, autographed by Lemieux, that were produced in 1984 for the 450th anniversary of the arrival of Jacques Cartier in Canada.

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