Lot 24: Jean-Paul Armand Mousseau 1927 - 1991 Canadian

Jean-Paul Armand Mousseau 1927 - 1991 Canadian gouache, ink and watercolour on paper Sans titre 9 x 12 inches 22.9 x 30.5 centimeters signed and dated 1948 Literature:Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, 2007, page 76 Provenance:Private Collection, Montreal Being the youngest member of the Automatist group, Jean-Paul Mousseau came to painting with different personal and visual influences from the others. In Mousseau's early gouaches, as in this fine example dated 1948, some saw incoherence and haphazard methods. But Claude Gauvreau, a visionary playwright and poet who was a signatory of the manifesto Refus Global (importantly published in the same year this painting was produced), was probably the first who recognized that this was a misinterpretation. Mousseau had gone beyond certain aspects of what Paul-Émile Borduas had defined as Automatism, most notably in the deconstruction of the notion of the object. In doing so, Mousseau redefined the sense of space in his paintings as well as the relations between the forms, thus bringing about a prelude to a greater liberation of the visual elements in an all-over approach to the painting surface. Roald Nasgaard elaborates that "in a de Kooning-like fashion he tears apart the residue of his imagery and scatters it evenly across the surface, concomitantly shattering illusionistic space into a consistently articulated bas-relief or Analytic Cubist space. His is a lively spontaneous expressionistic drawing co-ordinated by conscious formal structuring."