Ocres, jaune et vert, 1974 by Yves Gaucher

Provenance:
Private Collection, Quebec City
Sotheby's, auction, Toronto, 23 November 2010, lot 113
Private Collection, Halifax

Yves Gaucher’s masterly abstractions are a prime example of how various and visually rewarding this mode of painting has been over its roughly hundred and twenty-five year history. Historically, Gaucher is part of an unbroken examination of abstraction in Quebec from the 1940s to the present day, a remarkably long and potent engagement. Unlike the famous Automatists of an earlier generation–led by Paul-Émile Borduas– Gaucher nonetheless extended these pioneering investigations of abstraction. He was inspired directly by Les Plasticiens (Jauran [Rodolphe de Repentigny], Louis Belzile, Jean-Paul Jérôme), and Fernand Toupin and their 1955 "Manifeste des Plasticiens". Like these artists but in a younger cohort of "post-Plasticiens" including Charles Gagnon, Guido Molinari, and Claude Tousignant, Gaucher took abstraction into a more American-looking, hard edge direction.

An innovative printmaker, in painting Gaucher applied pigment with a roller and taped the edges where colours meet to achieve a strikingly clear abstract image. "Ocres, jaune et vert"–part of the colour-band series Gaucher began in the 1970s exemplifies this technique and its visual impact. Our mind and body instinctively take measurements of the relationships in size and colour as we stand in front of the work. How do the bands meet and play off one another? The yellow band looks quite different where it abuts the vibrant green versus where its edges meet the ochre just above. This painting looks different again from "Ocres, jaune no. 2" (Collection Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal), also 1974, for example, where all bands are of a similar hue. We might also wonder how the painting would be different if, for example, we "removed" one of the lateral stripes, as we can easily do by masking our gaze.

Precise edges encourage optical effects. Gaucher’s vibrant colour in the mid-1970s is a response, a way to work away from, his exquisitely subdued grey-on-grey works of the late 1960s or those combining grey and blue in the early 1970s. The opposite of what some New York critics thought was impersonal, Gaucher sought a strong response from viewers. The mood and effect of his colour band paintings extend from his colour choices and their combination. What is our mental state when we stand in front of the painting? Perhaps excitement, or animation? For Gaucher and many viewers, that response is akin to hearing and feeling music. He was famously struck by spatial movement in the compositions of Anton Webern, which he first heard in Paris in 1962. Analogies with music are of course central to the pioneers of abstraction, particularly Af Klint, Kandinsky, Kupka, and Mondrian. Gaucher was also fascinated by classical Indian music, titling his own works Raga on occasion. Visually and theoretically, he worked through Josef Albers’s colour experiments and Mondrian’s Neoplasticism as articulated in "The New Plastic in Painting" (1917) and subsequent essays. "Plastic" here is not a material but the ability to mold and change, used originally in the context of carving and modelling and renewed by Mondrian and other members of De Stijl in the early twentieth century. Gaucher extended and enriched these traditions in our own time.

We extend our thanks to Mark A. Cheetham for contributing the preceding essay. Mark is a professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, an independent curator, and art writer. Mark is the author of two books on abstract art: "The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting" (1991) and "Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure Since the ‘60s" (2006).