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拍品专文
‘I like the unholy and shameless vitality of [Riopelle’s] paintings and the blessed solar energy they radiate. They have no visual images, the image is hidden, but adventure they have and they are.’
–Pierre Boudreau
‘My paintings that are considered the most abstract are, in my opinion, the most representational in the strictest sense of the term. Conversely, are those paintings whose meanings we believe we are able to read - the geese, the owls, the moose - not actually more abstract than the rest? Abstract: ‘abstraction,’ ‘taken from,’ ‘to bring from’... I work the other way round. I do not take from Nature, I move toward Nature.’
–Jean-Paul Riopelle
Executed in 1959, the bustling canvas of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s abstract painting, Untitled, is awash with lavish strokes of thick impasto paint. An explosion of colour radiates like a firework from the surrounding white paint, which encircles the work like an inbuilt frame. Vibrant hues of red, blue, purple and green glisten in a kaleidoscopic haze, as a smear of bold yellow paint shines like a blazing sun, leading the eye across the painting’s surface in a hypnotic dance. Composed with grand, gestural brushstrokes, the work conveys a sense of rapid movement which can be traced within the richly painted canvas. The work indeed has a kind of existential aura: it seems life-like, like a sentient organism floating in space. This essential vitality is characteristic of Riopelle’s work from this period: as Bernard Dorival posits, ‘how could his paintings be other than alive?’ (B. Dorival, quoted in Jean-Paul Riopell, Montreal 1991, p. 81). Riopelle begun his career as a figurative painter from 1936 to 1944, before swiftly turning to non-figurative art in 1944-45. Excited by the dynamic paintings of the American Abstract Expressionists, he began experimenting with Lyrical Abstraction, applying multicolored facets of paint with a variety of tools on large canvases. From here his distinctive style blossomed. Where the performative action of Jackson Pollock’s iconic drip works was achieved through dripping paint across a horizontal canvas, Riopelle attained an analogous sense of powerful magnetism through flinging or smearing large quantities of paint onto vertical stretched canvases using a palette knife or brush, to create a voluminous and vitalized impasto surface.
As in the present work, Riopelle’s non-figurative compositions are both charismatic and enthralling. They pick up where words fall short, expressing something of pure and primal emotion. As Pierre Boudreau writes, ‘Riopelle succeeds where memory fails. The intangible is given a body, desire a pictorial life. Objects astray, discarded impressions, forgotten emotions are put together in a cocktail-shaker and are poured out on the rocks in a Venetian glass of exquisite transparency in a splendid explosion’ (P. Boudreau, ‘Preface,’ in Riopelle, exh. cat., London, 1959, unpaged). The resulting works are full of an electrifying energy: they resonate with an exuberance that seems to bear witness to the critical recognition and success that suddenly came to Riopelle in 1952. In Riopelle’s works, organic abstract forms and shapes overlap and meander across the surface, in an amalgamation of mass, texture and colour. At once expressive and controlled, the highly sculptural surface of Untitled exhibits an energetic juxtaposition between the artist’s generous, unrestrained application of paint, and his systematic attention to a geometric composition. Greatly inspired by the beauty of the natural world, Riopelle rejected the classification of his works as abstract: ‘My paintings that are considered the most abstract are, in my opinion, the most representational in the strictest sense of the term,’ he mused; ‘Conversely, are those paintings whose meanings we believe we are able to read - the geese, the owls, the moose - not actually more abstract than the rest? Abstract: “abstraction,” “taken from,” “to bring from” ... I work the other way round. I do not take from Nature, I move toward Nature.’ (J.-P. Riopelle, quoted in M. Waldberg, Riopelle, The Absolute Gap, pp. 39-54). Addressing the tension between abstraction and figuration, Untitled seems to convey this very essence of nature, concurrently reflecting the patterns of the natural landscape and the subconscious motions of human thought.
–Pierre Boudreau
‘My paintings that are considered the most abstract are, in my opinion, the most representational in the strictest sense of the term. Conversely, are those paintings whose meanings we believe we are able to read - the geese, the owls, the moose - not actually more abstract than the rest? Abstract: ‘abstraction,’ ‘taken from,’ ‘to bring from’... I work the other way round. I do not take from Nature, I move toward Nature.’
–Jean-Paul Riopelle
Executed in 1959, the bustling canvas of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s abstract painting, Untitled, is awash with lavish strokes of thick impasto paint. An explosion of colour radiates like a firework from the surrounding white paint, which encircles the work like an inbuilt frame. Vibrant hues of red, blue, purple and green glisten in a kaleidoscopic haze, as a smear of bold yellow paint shines like a blazing sun, leading the eye across the painting’s surface in a hypnotic dance. Composed with grand, gestural brushstrokes, the work conveys a sense of rapid movement which can be traced within the richly painted canvas. The work indeed has a kind of existential aura: it seems life-like, like a sentient organism floating in space. This essential vitality is characteristic of Riopelle’s work from this period: as Bernard Dorival posits, ‘how could his paintings be other than alive?’ (B. Dorival, quoted in Jean-Paul Riopell, Montreal 1991, p. 81). Riopelle begun his career as a figurative painter from 1936 to 1944, before swiftly turning to non-figurative art in 1944-45. Excited by the dynamic paintings of the American Abstract Expressionists, he began experimenting with Lyrical Abstraction, applying multicolored facets of paint with a variety of tools on large canvases. From here his distinctive style blossomed. Where the performative action of Jackson Pollock’s iconic drip works was achieved through dripping paint across a horizontal canvas, Riopelle attained an analogous sense of powerful magnetism through flinging or smearing large quantities of paint onto vertical stretched canvases using a palette knife or brush, to create a voluminous and vitalized impasto surface.
As in the present work, Riopelle’s non-figurative compositions are both charismatic and enthralling. They pick up where words fall short, expressing something of pure and primal emotion. As Pierre Boudreau writes, ‘Riopelle succeeds where memory fails. The intangible is given a body, desire a pictorial life. Objects astray, discarded impressions, forgotten emotions are put together in a cocktail-shaker and are poured out on the rocks in a Venetian glass of exquisite transparency in a splendid explosion’ (P. Boudreau, ‘Preface,’ in Riopelle, exh. cat., London, 1959, unpaged). The resulting works are full of an electrifying energy: they resonate with an exuberance that seems to bear witness to the critical recognition and success that suddenly came to Riopelle in 1952. In Riopelle’s works, organic abstract forms and shapes overlap and meander across the surface, in an amalgamation of mass, texture and colour. At once expressive and controlled, the highly sculptural surface of Untitled exhibits an energetic juxtaposition between the artist’s generous, unrestrained application of paint, and his systematic attention to a geometric composition. Greatly inspired by the beauty of the natural world, Riopelle rejected the classification of his works as abstract: ‘My paintings that are considered the most abstract are, in my opinion, the most representational in the strictest sense of the term,’ he mused; ‘Conversely, are those paintings whose meanings we believe we are able to read - the geese, the owls, the moose - not actually more abstract than the rest? Abstract: “abstraction,” “taken from,” “to bring from” ... I work the other way round. I do not take from Nature, I move toward Nature.’ (J.-P. Riopelle, quoted in M. Waldberg, Riopelle, The Absolute Gap, pp. 39-54). Addressing the tension between abstraction and figuration, Untitled seems to convey this very essence of nature, concurrently reflecting the patterns of the natural landscape and the subconscious motions of human thought.