Sold for: $11,250

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Mark Lanctôt, “Les insaisissables monochromes de Claude Tousignant,” in Paulette Gagnon ed., Mark Lanctôt, Marc Mayer, Claude Tousignant, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2009, page 26

Starting in the late 1980s, Claude Tousignant, who had long experimented with ideas of two-dimensionality with his monochromatic works on canvas, began using aluminum panels as a base for his painting. This piece, which belongs to his Écrans chromatiques series, is an excellent example of the interplay between flat layers of colour and three-dimensionality that characterize Tousignant’s works from this period. In Étude pour double écran chromatique #3, two squares of red and burgundy appear to have been painted directly onto the black backing board. This effect is a trick of the eye, reinforced by Tousignant’s perfectly uniform treatment of paint: these squares are two aluminum panels that hover an inch in front of the backing board with the help of strategically placed supports.

The two-dimensional appearance of Tousignant’s sculptural work reflects the series’ title, translated as “Chromatic screens”, and calls attention to the luminosity and uniformity of the picture plane as viewed head-on. As Mark Lanctôt writes, the matte, uniform colors of the paintings from this period almost makes us forget that the support is slightly removed from the wall, a bit like how, when watching a film, we forget about the screen on which it is projected.

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