Beginning in 1964, Claude Tousignant began to make his “target” paintings, where the rectangular picture plane was turned in on itself, into a series of concentric circles. The following years saw Tousignant play with the structural potential of these forms, producing a series of chromatically linked bands of colour in varying forms, delivered in pulsating, undulating rhythms. Between 1972 and 1977, he produced a series of diptychs employing just two or three bands of colour. These works moved away from the bright fluorescent tones of his earlier works to a reduced palette of more mineral tones. The change was reflected directly in the works’ titles, such as here in Phthalo Cadmium, referring to their source pigments. This reductive shift points to a distillation of colour to its purest, elemental base. Arranged in dialogue with each other, the paired canvases from this period demonstrate Tousignant’s foregrounding of a relational experience of complementary colour: here, for instance, the cool, expansive greens are in dialogue with the warm, thrumming reds. In perceiving the pair in tandem, the act of viewing becomes a sort of synthesis—a unified experience greater than its parts.

Please note: these works are unframed.