Nominal Four [Collage no. 7], 1994

The Estate of Jaan Põldaas

Nominal Four is part of a series of paintings that use a sequential square root variation of width to produce equal areas of different size and shape: “For followers of Jaan Poldaas the pattern of the “Nominal Four” series is a familiar and encouraging one: the artist, one of Toronto’s top abstractionists, takes another small but definitive step in an ongoing examination of colour and form. This time Poldaas starts with the primaries plus black and white, and creates with them a palette of eight colours: a deep red, an orange red, a bright blue, a royal blue, an earthy brown, a sandy brown, a dark grey and a light grey. Each canvas features the same pattern of overlapping squares, two of them bisected horizontally, two split vertically, and can be read as a cube sitting inside a series of increasingly large frames. In each painting, each different space is assigned one of the eight colours. Forms appear and disappear, space approaches and recedes, vistas open and close, colours pulsate and fade. Once again, the artist asks us to really look at the building blocks of art and in doing so makes us see.” - Kate Taylor, "Globe and Mail", 1994