Marcelle Ferron’s abstract painting distinguishes itself through the primacy of gesture and the illuminated strength of colour. One of the youngest signatories to the 1948 Refus global, Ferron was introduced to Automatist painting techniques by Paul-Émile Borduas. She soon developed an immensely personal vision of painting that prioritized an emotive, subconscious response over rational preconception. In 1953, as the Automatists were dissolving, she moved to Paris. This would prove to be the start of her most productive and revolutionary period, and the dazzling canvases she painted during the next decade would propel her to international recognition.

Ferron found the atmosphere of the French capital more freeing, more conducive to inspired work than the comparative conservatism of Montreal. She felt encouraged by a European market more open to bold, chromatic painting, and she found productive relationships with fellow expats and former Automatists Jean Paul Riopelle and Fernand Leduc as well as the American lyrical abstractionists already embedded in the city’s scene, among them Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis.

An important turn in her practice in the latter half of the 1950s was triggered by several key material developments. Paris allowed access to better and brighter paints than were available to her in Montreal: a wealthy patron donated a selection of pigments, which she would mix with linseed and poppyseed oils herself. Also, an influx of funding via a Canada Council grant in 1957 spurred her to start working with larger canvases. These surfaces accordingly demanded larger gestural sweeps of paint as much as they enabled them. Having long since discarded paintbrushes in favour of palette knives to apply her paints, she now required bigger blades or “squeegees,” which would need to be custom made and would sometimes be as long as a metre. All of these factors encouraged a bolder approach to painting characterized by effusive, dynamic rakes of colour, applied to the canvas with energetic, gestural motion.

The paintings Ferron produced by the end of the 1950s and into the early ’60s would be among her most successful and best recognized works. She was presenting solo exhibitions in increasingly important galleries in Paris and Brussels as well as appearing in group shows alongside Borduas and Riopelle. She would be included in the Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada in 1959 and in 1961 was part of the Canadian delegation at the sixth São Paulo Bienal, where she was awarded the Silver Medal.

Composition is an exceptional example to emerge from this productive period. Here, the painted form approaches an all-over application. The painted strokes are legibly individuated but are not fragmentary; rather, they blend and integrate, allowing the colours to swipe into and overlay onto each other. The background white, so often a central element in her canvases, is here reduced to the absolute minimum, pushed into the corners and spattered into the flurry of colours that command the field.

Whereas many of Ferron’s large-scale canvases take on the exaggerated formats typical of paintings—with the image delivered in towering verticals or wide horizontal breadths of landscape—here, unusually, the format is closer to square. Indeed, it is almost exactly the 5:4 aspect ratio most commonly seen in large-format photography. While this is more than likely just a formal coincidence, the aesthetic effect is undeniable: the image becomes an all-encompassing screen, where the rustle and buzz of colour swells to take over the image and threatens to burst at the edges.

This sense of light and colour exploding outwards, and the interplay between chromatic intensity and transparency, perhaps anticipates Ferron’s later turn to the medium of stained glass, a practice that would become her focus after her return to Montreal in 1966. However, where the optical effects of those works are animated by sunlight, Composition glows intensely with its own interior illumination.