Jean-Paul Riopelle

This extraordinarily early masterpiece from the most significant Canadian artist of the twentieth-century displays all the technical mastery of his later mature works. Painted soon after Riopelle moved to Paris, Untitled is a gloriously vibrant and intricate riot of colour that achieves the grandeur and simplicity of great art. Thickly textured, the rippling surface shifts through a kaleidoscope of contrasting colours, recalling all the vibrant force of an illuminated stained glass window and the vitality of nature. “My source of inspiration,” Riopelle mused, “…is Nature. I’m telling you, I am very representational.” (the artist cited in: Y. Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné 1939-1953, Vol. I, Montreal 1999, p. 45) This natural essence is reflected in this exuberant, joyful “grand mosaic” as colours dance in a flurry of animation. The painting almost seems to come alive. Yet for all the busy-ness, Riopelle creates a world of equilibrium within the painting; every drip of paint, every line of colour in this saturated canvas is precisely placed. It is in this careful nature of his composition that Riopelle’s canvases are most dissimilar to those of Jackson Pollock – the artist who he is most often likened to. Whereas for Pollock the overflowing, free gesture was all, Riopelle masters the application of paint both through drips and more directly using a spatula to merge the paint layers.

It is such a vital image that one can readily understand how strongly it affected Riopelle’s contemporaries, especially when set against the back-drop of post-war Paris. The somewhat purple prose of Georges Duthuit, writing in 1953, attests to this: “Like a trapper fresh from the Canadian solitudes, measuring his stride to our narrow pavements, Jean Paul Riopelle seems hardly to contain the flooding energies of youth at its full, its impetuosity and peremptoriness that bid defiance to distance and bulk. His manner recalls Victor Hugo’s lines; “He so pores on Nature / That Nature had disappeared paintings.” (Ibid., p. 43) Riopelle has succeeded in creating in this work a painting of “natural abstraction” in the tradition of Monet, Mondrian and Paul Klee combined with all the gestural power of the New York School.