Rose Slush, 1982

Galerie D’Art Yves Laroche, Montreal Private Collection, Quebec

Michael MacDonald,Award winner Jacques Hurtubise had great influence on abstract painting, “The Canadian Press”, January 1, 2015

As early as 1957, at age seventeen, Jacques Hurtubise exhibited his work at the Salon du printemps in Montreal. He attended the École des beaux-arts de Montréal until 1960, when a grant enabled the young painter to spend nine months in New York. There, he became enamored with the art of the Abstract Expressionists. Hurtubise was particularly drawn to the ‘Action Painting’ of De Kooning and Pollock, inspired by their spontaneous and lively paint application. Hurtubise divided his time between Montreal and New York for much of the 1960s, as he developed his unique style and experimented with hard-edge designs and repeated motifs combined with controlled “splashes” of pigment. The artist straddled painterliness and hard-edge painting throughout his career. By the mid-1970s he returned permanently to gestural works, which consisted of “deep-black pools, rivers and geometric forms”, as described by Sarah Fillmore, chief curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. The spontaneously painted black forms in “Rose Slush” demonstrates Hurtubise’s “gestural splash that repeats with different forms and backgrounds.” Following his daughter’s sudden and tragic death in 1980, Jacques Hurtubise decided to sell his Montreal home and travel for several years, distracting himself from the negative emotions associated with home. During this period, the artist began an extensive series of symmetrical paintings, composed of canvases folded in half, or two canvases pressed together, in order to create symmetrical abstract images. “Rose Slush” was completed early in the artist’s new phase, while Hurtubise was exploring the concept of symmetry. It is composed of two canvases displaying mirror images of his signature gestural lightning bolt-like forms. The acrylic painting is nearly symmetrical; at first glance it appears to be a true mirror image consisting of two canvases pressed together; however, upon closer inspection we see that “Rose Slush” is composed of three similar, but uneven shapes painted in the same colour palette.