Sans titre

Here & Now Art Gallery, Toronto 

Private Collection, Toronto

Rita Letendre: The Montreal Years 1953-1963, Montreal, 19 October-18 November 1989, page 30

Sans titre possesses an unexpected vital energy, considering the intimate scale of the work. Likely dating to the early 1960s, the work demonstrates Letendre’s personal reaction to the gestural abstractions of Les Automatistes. The confident use of impasto creates a rich, sculptural surface. The bold composition is organized into clearly demarcated horizontal bands, with a row of spike forms floating through the centre. Letendre experimented with a number of variations of this fundamental visual structure in 1961. The painting is balanced with bands of red and sap green at the top and bottom. These complementary hues are set off by high-contrast black and white. The jagged boundaries of colour carry the association of trees and mountains. Letendre was interested in imbuing her paintings with a primal energy connected to natural forces. She described her work of the period as “the consummation of power” based on a need “to express the force of living nature, the expansion of natural growth.”