Jean Paul Riopelle

Jean Paul Riopelle Automne II Symphony 1954 Oil on canvas 60 x 73 cm. Framed. Signed and dated on the back of the canvas 'Riopelle Riopelle 54'. - With slight signs of age. Yseult Riopelle (ed.), Jean Paul Riopelle, Catalogue Raisonné, vol.2, 1954-1959, Montréal 2004, WVZ no.1954.056H.1954 (with erroneous measurements). Provenance Galerie Jacques Dubourg, Paris; Galerie Änne Abels, Cologne (1967); private collection, Rhineland Exhibitions Cologne 1959 (Galerie Änne Abels), Jean Paul Riopelle, Ausst.Kat.Nr.4, o.p. with ill. (with sticker on the back) "Automne II - Symphony" is created during a peak period of Jean Paul Riopelle's artistic development. The radiant, mosaic-like color relief is evidence of the confident, individual handwriting and the coloristic talent of the still young artist. As early as 1945, the Canadian Riopelle became a member of the artist group "Les Automatistes", which was influenced by action painting, at his place of study Montreal. In 1947 he moved to the art metropolis Paris. In 1947 he moved to the art metropolis of Paris, where he came into contact with the works of fellow Surrealist, Tachist and Informal artists such as Pierre Soulages, Wols and Georges Mathieu, and found his characteristic way of expression. Inspired by the "all-over-paintings" of Jackson Pollock, he has been using an energetically automated yet guided technique since 1950, whose "force of nature" Werner Schmalenbach describes: "This is no longer painting as it used to be. The painting tools are wielded like weapons. Painting becomes fencing. In powerful blows, the palette knife tears sharp paths in the paint flung across the canvas. If the paint has already been applied impasto, the palette knife plows it up into valleys and ridges. The surface becomes a moving relief" (in: Ausst.Kat. Jean-Paul Riopelle, Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover 1958/1959, p.9f.). The latent references to nature in Riopelle's paintings are already partly evident from the titles chosen. "Automne II - Symphonie" evokes, similar to paintings from the same year, such as "Gelée des bois" or "Sous le bois", associations with a forest thicket, with coolness and humidity and with light reflections between multicolored foliage. However, the painter does not start from an experience of nature, which he abstracts. Rather, he uses the abstract, gestural treatment of color to understand the essence of nature, its manifestations and organic processes and to approach its essence, as it were. In his introduction to the solo exhibition that the Galerie Änne Abels organized for Riopelle in 1959 and in which the work offered here is also shown, Eduard Trier writes: "Precious and radiant, these spontaneously painted pictures appeared as a feast for the eyes, as a contemporary revival of Impressionist colorfulness, without the pretense of the representational. As dense webs of impasto applied, luminous colors, these compositions seemed at once material and immaterial; they were dense and yet of transparent spatiality. The painterly detail was just as interesting as the entire surface, which was brought to life by the color to form a breathing skin and which, although nowhere an accentuated form asserted itself as the 'center of the picture' or the focal point of the painterly action, was not a decorative pattern." (in: Ausst.Kat. Jean Paul Riopelle, Galerie Änne Abels, Cologne 1959, o.p.).