Splash (Passage Series), 1969

Private Collection, Montreal

Fernand Leduc was an active influence and participant in the development of abstract art in Quebec. Not only a signatory of the 1948 Refus Global, the artist was also responsible for making contact with the French writer André Breton in New York in order to make European surrealists more aware of the contribution of the Montréal Automatistes. After spending six years in Paris, in 1953 Leduc returned to Montreal with the feeling that the gestural automatiste painting was reaching an impasse. The artist steadily moved to a type of hard-edge abstraction by 1955, his works gradually acquiring rich colour contrasts. In the same year, Leduc came to the defense of these avant-garde and thus controversial Plasticien-related theories during the exhibition “Espace 55”. By 1956 he had become the president-founder of the Non-Figurative Artists’ Association of Montréal. The artist returned to France in 1959 and lived there until 1970, where he would have completed “Splash”. The canvas highlights the artist’s continuously evolving abstract style. By the mid-1960s Leduc had relaxed his hard-edge geometric compositions in favour of more curvaceous forms. “Splash” embodies the minimalist and contrasting colour palette that was typical of the Plasticiens, but he softened the shapes into what feels like a green river flowing through a raspberry- coloured field. The bold canvas is a perfect example of Leduc’s ability to consistently revitalize the genre of abstract art throughout his prolific career.