Intersection

Provenance:
Galerie Camille Hébert, Montreal

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Private Collection, California

Exhibitions:
Galerie Camille Hébert, Montreal, 1964

Literature:
Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painting", Art News, volume 51, #8, December 1953, page 23
Notes:
Of all our artists, the one who had the clearest grasp of American painting of the 1950s and the 1960s was Charles Gagnon. He lived in New York from 1955 to 1960, and was witness to the "great turn", when one American gallery after another began to exhibit American art instead of post-war European masters. In the early 1960s, this turn was also about to take place in Montreal. One of the most touching details of the present painting is the faded sticker of the Galerie Camille Hébert on verso. Camille Hébert, along with Fernande Saint-Martin, Yves Lasnier and Otto Bengle, was one of the courageous gallery owners in Montreal who were open to the new trends. Intersection was shown at his gallery in 1964, one year after completion, and was bought there by a private collector in 1966. This painting is part of the series of the so-called Gap paintings by Gagnon. In these paintings, one habitually gets a strong sense of pictorial space, open like a window on an event.

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When one sees Intersection, one is reminded of the reaction of Ruth Kligman - Willem de Kooning's girlfriend at the time - when she saw a large blue and yellow painting on de Kooning's studio wall. She immediately exclaimed, "Zowie!" - street slang for a masterpiece, a term which was relished by New York painters at the end of the 1950s. Later de Kooning called the painting Ruth's Zowie, 1957. Zowie! then, for Gagnon's Intersection!

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At first sight, the two paintings may seem to have similarities. Are we not witnessing the same speed of improvisation, the same large brush-strokes - indifferent to the splashing of a few droplets here and there? But there are considerable differences. De Kooning seemed not to have been overly concerned with the limits of the surface on which he worked, and things came and went in and out of the frame. However, these limits were crucial for Gagnon - the painting was structured by them. For de Kooning, the painting was, as the American critic Harold Rosenberg said, "an arena where to act" rather than the representation of an object. For Gagnon, the painting was a window, but a window opening on nothing but itself - we are far from Leon Battisti Alberti, and from the Surrealists. This is why the green angle on the right hand upper corner of Intersection is so important. It establishes a limit, a boundary. From then on, the trajectories of paint can only curve in on themselves and return to a point zero, to a quiet centre. In de Kooning's work, the brush-strokes often suggested signs, letters or shapes (here a V, there an A, here a door or there a hat), with landscapes and female bodies indistinguishable from each other. In Gagnon's paintings, most of which were untitled during this period, there are no signs, no hidden subject matter, no landscape, no highways - just a gap, an interval. On a later painting he wrote this intriguing maxim: "Seuls les éternuements sont éternels." (Only sneezes are eternal.) That is what he meant in Intersection - a moment of outburst, of change of direction - when it is impossible to distinguish an instant from eternity, when the mind escapes from linear time for a second. In the centre of the picture, a dull pink area seems to indicate that it is there that we touch the other side of the mirror, the silvery lining that is opaque and gives nothing more to the eye to look at. In other words, we are entering the zone of perfect quietness, the satori of Zen Buddhism, which is also a flash of sudden awareness.

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We thank François-Marc Gagnon of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute of Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, for contributing the above essay.