Lot 109: CLAUDE TOUSIGNANT B.1932

CLAUDE TOUSIGNANT B.1932 ABSURDO titled on four labels and dated 1964 on one on the reverse acrylic on canvas 182.9 by 182.9 cm. 72 by 72 in.

Kitchener - Waterloo Art Gallery, date unknown

Galerie du Siècle, Montreal, May, 1964

São Paulo Biennial, Brazil, September, 1965

Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto, 2007, p. 192

Galerie du Siècle, Montreal

Private Collection, Quebec City

Claude Tousignant was a giant in the development of abstract art in Canada and, arguably, internationally. He is associated with the second generation of Plasticiens, a group of Quebecois painters who rose to prominence in the mid-fifties whose work is characterised by an interest in painting's plastic elements of tone, texture, form, line and colour. It is non-figurative and concerned with geometric abstraction. The Plasticien Manifesto championed Piet Mondrian as its hero and echoed the quest for purity and true objectivity in painting espoused in Greenbergian Modernist theory.

Claude Tousignant's painting Absurdo succinctly and eloquently uses the power of colour, size and form to expose the essence of painting as pure sensation. The circle is Tousignant's iconic structural element and allowed him to escape the historical conventions of the rectangular picture plane, to eliminate formal tension and to emphasize the autonomy of the art object.

Nasgaard comments: These are compositions whose rhythmic movement seems forever generated and regenerated, overlapping the confines of the rectangle, but at the same time checked and held in place by it.

If shape is the vehicle, colour is what drives Tousignant's painting. Absurdo's colours possess inherent power and dynamic energy and, when combined with the scale of the canvas, contribute to a thoroughly commanding painting.