L’espace d’un moment—which translates to “in the space of a moment” or “a moment in time”—embodies an important and dynamic period in Rita Letendre’s artistic career when she moved away from narrow, mosaic-like compositions indebted to the Automatists’ style and radicalized her singular visual vocabulary. She began to favour broader, more instinctive planes of colour, before later moving on to hard-edged arrows.

Works from this transitionary period explore the dynamism of bringing two masses of colour together. Said Letendre (translated from the French): “I didn’t want these masses to float in space. I wanted them firmly anchored to the frame, in relation to it.… I placed a little reddish-brown paint very close to the black mass. Then, I’d clean my spatula and use it to sweep the colour all at once, making a trace in the black, but not covering it.”

Here, she brings together swathes of brownish orange and black, with dramatic bright green and white sweeps over top, creating a figure-ground relation. The darker background is enlivened by Letendre’s spatula, leaving the surface deeply textured. From 1962 to 1963, Letendre traveled to Europe for the first time, staying in Paris, Italy and Israel. Her travels were incredibly inspiring and brought an intensely creative period for the artist.