Sold for: $55,575

PROVENANCE
Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary
Private Collection, Ontario

LITERATURE
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2007, page 180

Rita Letendre is one of the important Abstract Expressionists in Canadian art, and her early work from 1953 to 1963 established her national and international reputation. Confluent is a keynote of her oeuvre, one with a powerful design punch and terrific painterly passion. An incredible sense of dynamism that is at once highly specific and incipiently abstract accrues from the dancing shapes, which cross the surface to create a sense of movement. The title of the work reveals the essential magic of the composition: confluent – a flowing or coming together, a meeting of forms, a junction of great energies.

As Roald Nasgaard points out in Abstract Painting in Canada, here and in other works of 1961, Letendre created a “sense of turbulent drama...intensified by brighter colours pushing, as if seeking liberation, against masses of black.”

Throughout her painting life, Letendre has pursued an art whose primary materials are colour, light and space. Her work has matured impressively, gaining pictorial weight achieved with tactile surfaces and a rich palette, combined with a subtle sense of space - sometimes composed of planes which seemingly reflect rays of light and divisions in space. Hers has been a narrative about beauty, and her images reflect an instinctive formal elegance. Despite her work’s ostensible simplicity, the results are satisfying as well as informing, intent on not simply repeating the past.

This painting, with its back-to-basics abstraction characterized by simple forms, bold colour and an emphasis on process through the use of the palette knife as a paint tool, expresses the soaring joy of Letendre’s path. The result, along with several of her other well-known works painted the same year such as Victoire, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, and The Realm of the Samurai, in the collection of The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, is one of the high points of her work.

We thank Joan Murray for contributing the above essay.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars