Jean Paul Riopelle was an endlessly and intuitively experimental artist. He was a central figure in Quebec and Canada when he moved to France in 1947, and he remains the most internationally acclaimed Canadian artist of his generation. Yet in France he quickly moved on from his early interest in Surrealism and automatic abstraction. Riopelle came to reject distinctions between abstraction and figuration, seeing them blend into one another or working in dynamic alternation. “The truth is, there's no abstraction in painting,” he asserted in a published interview. “Turner came close, Monet also … Vuillard even more. Abstraction is impossible: so is the figurative.”[1]

Looking at a Riopelle demands that we adopt his creative freedom. His large and kinetic paintings of the 1970s are a case in point. Not as familiar as his “mosaic” canvases of two decades earlier, for example, paintings such as Sans titre from 1977 defy easy categorization and ask us to look with fresh eyes. We are met by an assertive canvas: colours are vibrant and in motion; the inventory of shapes (and how they are applied to the surface) is extensive. Importantly too, Sans titre is decidedly horizontal, insisting on the “landscape” format.

Riopelle’s beliefs about figuration and abstraction should shield us from looking here for a landscape in the sense of a place. But there are landscape elements, including the vibrant blue passages that remind us of sky or water and the autumnal hues in the centre, reminiscent of fall colours in Quebec, to which Riopelle returned permanently in 1972. The work is divided into roughly a third at the bottom and two thirds above, giving us a fleeting sense of a horizon line. The abundant white is characteristic of Riopelle’s palette at this time, in part because of his increasing time in the Far North from the late 1960s. It was in fact in 1977 that he visited the Arctic for the first time.

A captivating element in Sans titre is the sinewy line that meanders diagonally across most of the surface. This line forms loops and criss-crosses that isolate and magnify passages of the painting, creating vignettes of colour and form. The line is free and playful, yet it also seems purposeful. From the late 1960s, Riopelle was fascinated by Inuit “string games,” their creative formation of shapes. He claimed in an interview with Gilbert Érouart that “cat’s-cradles, for the Indians and Inuit [are very important]; their skill in this area is profound.… Cat’s-cradles, hunting, fishing… Tying flies: that’s an art.”[2] His exhibition Ficelles et autres jeux (Strings and Other Games) was presented at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris and at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1972. What we see in part in Sans titre is one of Riopelle’s cat’s cradles.

We thank Mark A. Cheetham for contributing the above essay. He is the author of two books on abstract art: The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting and Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the ’60s. He is a professor of art history at the University of Toronto and a freelance curator and artwriter.

1. Quoted in Gilbert Érouart, Riopelle in Conversation, trans. Donald Winkler (Concord, ON: House of Anansi, 1995), 25.

2. Ibid., 24.