Untitled

Provenance:
Private Collection, Toronto
Notes:
Emerging from a vibrant Montreal art scene, Jean McEwen was a unique voice in Canadian abstract painting, breaking away from the early influences of Paul-Émile Borduas and the Automatists to create a singular vision of colour and form. McEwen moved to Paris in 1951 and, encouraged by Borduas, met Jean Paul Riopelle, then in the midst of exploring Lyrical Abstraction. During this time he was also exposed to the American Abstract Expressionists showing in Paris, and, after an introduction to Sam Francis, he quickly became influenced by Francis’s luminous use of colour. It is within this environment, surrounded by the avant-garde of Canadian, European and American painting, that McEwen was exposed to modernist techniques, the full use of a large-format field, reduction of painting to its constituent parts of surface and colour, and an urgent desire to explore the limits of the medium.

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From this roiling mix of influences McEwen created his own language of abstraction grounded in exploring the relationship between structure and colour, building ephemeral canvases that explore their own making through an all-over application of pigment. On his return to Montreal in 1953, McEwen quickly established himself as a distinctive presence in Canadian abstraction. Moving away from the earlier influences of the Automatists, Borduas and Riopelle, he developed, as Fernande Saint-Martin described, an “abstract impressionism” characterized by the “dynamic possibilities of colour.”

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Throughout the 1950s, McEwen’s style would undergo a rapid evolution. An initial return to Borduas’s figuration in 1953 would soon lead to an abandonment of the palette knife in favour of direct application of paint with his hands, producing textural and softened surfaces. From 1955, McEwen would produce increasingly complex works, moving from soft monochromes to bold architectural structures. From 1960 to 1963, McEwen’s painting was dominated by a recurring interest in verticals, and the canvases he produced in this time are defined by conspicuous bisections and towering blocks that extend across the canvas. Equally important is his use of illumination to intensify colour, with thickly applied layers of pigment attenuated and enlivened by hazy perforations, fraying edges and interplays between transparency and opacity.

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It is in this vital context that Untitled was produced. This work exemplifies the evolution of McEwen’s style at this point, exuberantly declaring its own materiality. The foreground is dominated by a pair of red columnar fields that seem to float above the ground with carmine illumination. The red patches are not solid masses, but porous and hazy, and reveal and blur into the ochre layers beneath them – which are burnished with a deeper reddish glow. The ochre is divided by a horizon line of deeper black, offsetting the pillars of red and making them appear to float above a broken plane. This balance between vertical and horizontal reveals a push-pull effect, and the whole canvas appears to breathe and swell. Emerging from the turbulent depths and erupting at the margins of the work are gleams of white and crackles of blue - flashes of the stratified underlayer of paint, revealed in electric blinks that subtly offset and accent the warmer tones that dominate the centre of the piece.

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Reds, blues, yellows, black, white: these are primary colours, the essential hues of pigment that blur into one another and suffuse the work with elemental richness. The buildup of transparent and opaque layers produces a sensuous feeling of depth and complexity, and the work seems to shimmer with an interior, primordial radiance. In Untitled, McEwen demonstrates his skill at creating visceral colour fields, masterfully evoking a sensual visual experience.