Fernand Leduc

BYDealers Auction House Biography and Notes

For Fernand Leduc, the second half of the 1950s constituted a "tipping point," as Michel Martin has it, "that the painter attributed to the very act of painting, which found expression in the 'absolute form and vitality of colour,' and became the premise of his constructed abstract art." (translation ours) Following his doors and paving stones periods, from 1955 onward, Leduc's paintings progressively gave way to orthogonal constructions wherein lines and soft-edge planes systematically began to harden, even as oblique angles and curves were introduced in subsequent years. Gaze Etimine, an oil painting from 1955, is part of a series of small-format works the artist painted on Mont-Saint-Hilaire. Their formal play, at once synthetic and rigorous, comes alive in colours - sometimes subdued, sometimes vibrant - but always inventive and revealing of Leduc's cycle of progress. That year also coincided with the publication of the Manifeste des Plasticiens, by artists Louis Belzile, Jean- Paul Jérôme, Fernand Toupin, and Jauran, in Montreal on February 10, 1955. In it, the authors claimed their works were subject to "the unceasing purification of plastic elements and their order," (translation ours) concerns shared, at least "in their intention," by Leduc. (A. L.)