Reflet, 1970

Private Collection, Montreal Bonhams, auction, Toronto, 19 June 2008, lot 162 Private Collection, Toronto

Galerie de Montréal, 25 November-31 December 1971

Claude-Lyse Gagnon, "Vie des Arts", Montreal, Winter 1969-1970, reproduced page 57 Joan Murray, "Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century", Toronto, 1999, page 99

As one of the few women artists at the centre of abstract art in Canada, Rita Letendre holds an important position in Canadian art history. She produced some of the most innovative examples of abstraction, her style always fluctuating between gestural and hard-edge abstraction. Letendre was influenced by Paul-Émile Borduas and "Les Automatistes" in the 1950s, but in the following decade, after a large mural commission at the University of California, the artist moved towards hard-edge abstraction, playing with flattened planes of colour with sharp lines. Letendre’s large canvases of the 1970s explore her fascination with speed and vibration. The sharp wedges or arrows that cut across the image plane are characteristic of her work from the decade. In "Reflet" a black ‘wedge’ shoots downward across the canvas, surrounded by green, yellow and fuschia bands of varying width, and a tomato red ground. Joan Murray discusses these important works produced by the artist during the 1970s, including "Reflet", stating: “Rita Letendre explored colour, line and composition through the use of forceful chevrons that cut across the composition diagonally or horizontally from one corner of the painting to the other. She obtained extra energy from applying narrow ridges of contrasting colour to the borders of each ray.” The sharp lines of bright colour all converge to a single point at the tip of the black ‘wedge’ in this painting, magnifying and concentrating the energy shooting downward.