Sold for: $16,520

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
James D. Campbell, After Geometry: The Abstract Art of Claude Tousignant, 1995, page 116
“Claude Tousignant,” National Gallery of Canada, https://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artist.php?iartistid=5492, accessed August 17, 2016

Through the reductive and pure nature of his work and his treatment of colour and space, Claude Tousignant shows his absolute dedication to abstraction. Early influences for this Montreal modernist were painters such as Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevitch, who both used geometry and flat colour.

By 1988, Tousignant was using aluminum panels rather than canvas for the ground of his paintings, as he does here. According to James Campbell, Tousignant believed that the "material could enhance the objectival character of painting...The thinness of the frontal plane afforded by aluminum sheet was attractive." In this same year, Tousignant began his Écran chromatique series, continuing his explorations of chromatic fields. This particular work, with its double squares floating on a dark background, challenges our perceptions. The deep cobalt may exert its presence more stealthily, but its pulsation is as active as the more visible bright orange square. This vibratory painting achieves Tousignant's expressed aim: to "make painting objective, to bring it back to its source—where only painting remains, emptied of all extraneous matter—to the point at which painting is pure sensation."

All prices are in Canadian Dollars