Motes of expression

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This article was published 22/06/2024 (820 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT IT IS: Poussière de Soleil (1953-1954), or Sun Dust, by Jean-Paul Riopelle is part of a retrospective exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada and now on view at WAG-Qaumajuq. Marking the centennial of Riopelle’s birth, the show covers five decades of the Quebec artist’s prolific and searching work in several mediums, including his iconic and influential abstract paintings of the 1950s.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: With Sun Dust, Riopelle (1923-2002) is creating not a realistic representation of the physical world but rather an abstract evocation of the energy and beauty of nature. The image can be interpreted as the sun breaking through trees, with a central area of white light surrounded by forms that could indicate foliage and branches. In this reading of the work, the dynamic diagonals surging out from the centre suggest the shifting patterns of trees moving in the wind.

As with the best abstract work, though, Sun Dust is also about the power of paint on canvas. Colour and line have their own internal life here, with Riopelle’s characteristic “mosaic” technique, in which he applies “tiles” of paint directly onto the canvas with a palette knife, combining intense hues with a repeating, rhythmic sense of structure.

WHY IT MATTERS: For me, Sun Dust is a compelling reminder of why seeing art in person is so important.

Back in the 1980s, as a grad student in art history, I took part in a seminar on American Abstract Expressionism, looking at artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, whose work is related to Riopelle’s. We would talk in class about Ab-Ex artists and issues of gender and sex. We would discuss how the works functioned in the art market and as markers of social status. We would explore how they expressed American ideals of freedom and individualism during the ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Then we got the chance to go on a field trip with the studio students to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., to see some of these works in person. For me, that was a revelation. It wasn’t that all those cerebral ideas about the social and political dimensions of the art disappeared. It’s more that the works themselves, when I finally met them, hit me with an unexpected physical and emotional force.

This experience was reinforced later that year when I burst into tears in a room full of Rothko colour-field paintings at the Tate Gallery in London.

There are aspects of artworks you can’t quite get by looking at a small, flat reproduction in a book or newspaper, or on a website.

First off, there’s the scale. Sun Dust is big: It measures 2.45 by 3.45 metres. You don’t just visually observe a work like this. It’s more like entering into a one-on-one physical encounter.

I once saw a group of middle-schoolers visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. One girl was faced away from Pollock’s massive drip painting Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), maybe one of the most famous works of the 20th century. She was talking and joking with her friends, as teenagers do, when she was admonished by a security guard.

“Never turn your back on a painting,” he said sternly. In his view, to ignore the painting would be as rude as ignoring another human being.

Then there’s the dimensionality. The show at WAG-Qaumajuq features a number of Riopelle’s rough-textured 3D bronze sculptures. But when you see — really see — the intense physicality of the oil paint in a work like Sun Dust, you realize that Riopelle’s paintings are also, in their own way, three dimensional. The paint application is so thick that in places it juts out noticeably from the canvas, forming whorls and edges.

You also apprehend the extraordinary finish of the paint, which seems so creamy and smeary and malleable and fresh, almost as if — even after 70 years — it hasn’t quite dried.

When I think about paintings, I often differentiate between the works I’ve seen in reproduction and the ones I’ve seen “in the flesh.” I realize that when I use that phrase, I’m referring not just to my own body but to the body of the painting, which can be so layered, so moving, so surprising.

You might love or hate Sun Dust — and abstract art can be polarizing — but you should get to know it, in person, before you decide.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca