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Artist or Maker: Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002)

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Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner.

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Literature: Y. Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle catalogue raisonné, 1939-1953, vol. I, Montreal 1999, no. 1950.010H.1950 (illustrated, p. 371).

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Notes: Filled with vitality, the intensely kaleidoscopic Untitled, executed in 1950, bears witness to Riopelles consolidation as a painter. Untitled is one of the first oils in which Riopelle had truly discovered and developed his unique abstract idiom, and thus acts a showcase for the many painterly techniques that he explored in his abstract works. As such, it is confident, yet remains engagingly experimental. Unlike many of his later paintings, Untitled manages to give a sense of cathedral-like space with its implied foreground and background: against the mosaic of tessellated, luminous colours (which themselves would come to dominate his canvases within a few years) we see the lace-like dripping focussed in the fore. This creates an internal logic to the painting, with the intensification of the density, and of the drama, in the centre. This mixture of techniques, which would gradually recede from his work in the years to come, adds a textural variety that invokes sensuality and sensation.
Untitled bears witness to the consolidation and development that marked Riopelles art during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He had been living in Paris for some years, where he had been exposed to the Surrealists, as well as other artists such as Bram van Velde, Hartung and de Staël. Ironically, Paris also provided him with greater exposure to some of the great American artists of the day than his native Canada. Only the year before Untitled was painted, Riopelle had not only had his first one man exhibition, but had also had his paintings shown alongside those of the likes of Pollock, Rothko and Sam Francis.
This mixture of influences, against the backdrop of Post-War Paris, germinated in Riopelles art to create something instinctive and intuitive, something that embraced some of the chaos and hazard of Surrealism, but which shrugged off the formal fetters of the Western artistic tradition. In creating intricate paintings like Untitled, Riopelle was conjuring into existence something more immense and entire. Riopelle saw his role as artist in a shamanic light, rather than as a skilled painter. He merged his interest in nature with the automatism that so fascinated the Surrealists. Riopelle would enter an almost trance-like state to paint, acting as a medium for nature, for the forces that shaped his painting. He would try to eradicate as much of himself, of his conscious aesthetic decisions, instead allowing instinct to guide him. Rather than paint figuratively from the world around him, creating images, Riopelle hoped to create something organic that contained some of the quality of existence within it: 'I do not take from Nature, I move toward Nature' (Riopelle, quoted in M. Waldberg, 'Riopelle, The Absolute Gap, pp. 39-54, Y. Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle catalogue raisonné 1939-1953, Vol. I, Montreal, 1999, p. 42).

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