Quebec modernist Claude Tousignant’s retrospective at the Musée d’art contemporain is the largest solo show in the museum’s history. This chronological survey beginning in 1951 and ending with new work created especially for the exhibition bears witness to Tousignant’s life-long quest to push painting into the realm of pure sensation. Rather than a curator’s prescribed interpretation, the 91 paintings on display allow the viewer to experience what a modern master has been working at for over six decades. No explanation is required.
In the 1950s and early Sixties, Montreal-born Tousignant moved from an abstraction based on colour and brushstrokes in the vein of Matisse and Cezanne to an investigation of geometry, line and colour influenced by Mondrian. In 1959, he wrote: “What I wish to do is make painting objective, to bring it back to its source – where only painting remains, emptied of everything extraneous to it – to the point at which painting is nothing but sensation.”
By the mid-Sixties, his experiments became more systematic; he used series to investigate colour in different ways. Fundamental to his international reputation, these large paintings on circular canvases occupy the largest space in the show. One series of these now iconic target-like works, Gong, was inspired by Edgar Varese’s observation of the perpetuation of a gong’s sound in one of his musical compositions. The title is meant to be a clue about how the paintings function. Indeed, the picture plane composed of narrow bands of colour, where some advance and others recede, creates an undulating field that seems to move before your eyes. It is here that Tousignant’s mastery is most vividly on display.
Having harnessed the power of perceptual tension, Tousignant continued to make paintings that created a charged visual field. In the 1980s and ‘90s, his work (literally) came off the wall. His monochromatic canvases were conceived of more as objects creating space than as paintings drawing you into their pictorial space. Here, the gallery is a field to be charged by multiple large scale canvases.
“Just how far does the painter take the articulation of colour in space?” asks curator Paulette Gagnon. One could answer: not far enough. When his work becomes paintings used to create environments, they remain too grounded in painting. Why use canvases? These spaces filled with paintings seem stuck in a dialogue about painting from the 1970s and unable to compete with contemporaries working on the same problem.
This is an issue he attempts to redress in his most recent work made specifically for this show. In L’Oeuvre au noir, Tousignant adopts the now standard installation method of the pitch black room that initially disorients the body. Four coloured prisms emanate (or absorb?) light. Like a strange meteor that landed in this space, the piece is alien to the work of the rest of the show. It seems that this type of space-making is best left to James Turrell.
The originality of Tousignant’s work may be somewhat lost on the contemporary viewer. What was once shocking about his painting (and that of his contemporaries) has been appropriated as our contemporary aesthetic. The same use of colour now turns up in scarves sold at the Gap, or more literally with Tousignant’s work by target, as a logo. But seen in person, his body of work remains quite physically powerful.
Anne Dickens is a designer new to Montreal.
The Claude Tousignant Retrospective continues at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal through April 26.
