Pierre Gauvreau

BYDealers Auction House Biography and Notes

Provocative, rebellious, brilliant; there is no lack of superlatives to describe the spirit of artist Pierre Gauvreau and the impact of his cultural legacy in Quebec. The oldest brother of the no-less-famous poet Claude Gauvreau, the painter would constantly reinvent himself throughout his career, becoming an author, scriptwriter, and television and film producer. In 1948, he signed the Refus global, the famous manifesto conceived among friends and published by Les éditions Mithra-Mythe, founded by photographer Maurice Perron. In the early 1960s, Gauvreau abandoned painting, only to return to it with renewed vigour in 1975: "The influence of the director's directing [is] decisive . This reality originates in a mediatized vision of the real, channeled by the multiple screens juxtaposed like holes in a wall; light sources, or windows open to somewhere else, to different aspects of the world," wrote Monique Brunet-Weinman. The painting Tombola, executed in 1978, perfectly demonstrates the painter's experience through this new vision, firmly characterized by surrealism, "tame automatism," while taking into account recent breakthroughs and trends from the American art scene. A fiery and lyrical gesture dominates the works from this extraordinary and particularly noteworthy year in Gauvreau's work. The colour palette in Tombola, almost identical to that of Fenêtres de Pénélope (1978), is dominated by orange, green, chocolate brown, white, and soft pink in the background. The motifs and graphic elements constitute the painter's distinctive writing, present in several works from the same period. Resolutely radiant and audacious, this work is one of undeniable importance by an unclassifiable artist. (A. L.)