Sold for: $9,945

PROVENANCE
A gift from the Artist to the present Private Collection, Montreal

Louis Belzile was a founding member of the Plasticiens movement whose members, after the revolution started by the Automatists, broke even further away from modes of traditional painting and created works concerned purely with the most basic, formal elements of art: line and colour. Their artistic concerns were with the relationship between these two elements with the resulting play of contrasts and form, and our perception of them. In Composition, Belzile is playing with all of these things: creating and defining spaces - a box with depth, a floating circle - and then deconstructing them with line, changing the perceived spaces into illusions of perceived spaces, and never allowing us to rest on such simple solutions when looking at his work. The Plasticiens admired the work of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, and considered his (and their) geometric approach to painting a form of artistic perfection. Belzile’s work differs somewhat from the other original members of the Plasticiens - Jauran (Rodolphe de Repentigny), Jean-Paul Jérôme and Fernand Toupin in that his works often include areas of textural treatment, and that he drew his geometry freehand.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars