Lot 43: Rodolphe (Jauran) de Repentigny 1926 - 1959

Rodolphe (Jauran) de Repentigny 1926 - 1959 Canadian oil on board Sans titre 24 3/4 x 23 1/4 inches 62.9 x 59 centimeters on verso dated 1955 on a label and inscribed ""no. 206"" Literature:Yves Lacasse and John R. Porter, editors, The Collection of the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec: A History of Art in Quebec, 2004, essay by Pierre Landry, page 152 Provenance:Estate of the Artist Exhibited:L'Échourie, Montreal, Plasticiens, February 11 - March 2, 1955 Before founding the Plasticien group alongside Louis Belzile, Jean-Paul Jérôme and Fernand Toupin, Rodolphe de Repentigny was already an established and well-respected art theoretician and critic for La Presse. He was among the first to publicly acknowledge and stress the importance of non-figurative art in Quebec's social and artistic evolution; his point of view was crucial and extremely influential. In 1955, under the pseudonym Jauran, de Repentigny wrote and launched the Plasticien manifesto which led to a new avant-garde movement in response to Automatism. This important and rare abstract work was exhibited during the first Plasticien show at L'Échourie in 1955. Its meticulous composition, with its juxtaposition of faceted edges of contrasting forms, is typical of Jauran's technique and vision. The Plasticiens, through their refined use of the pure "plastic" elements, liberated the pictorial field of any expressionistic heaviness and created a new spatial language and aesthetics. Pierre Landry wrote, "Jauran's painted oeuvre, based on Plasticien theory, served as a catalyst to the development of an abstract geometric style in Quebec that remained current into the 1970s and beyond."