Five decades ago, Claude Tousignant, one of a handful of artists who redefined abstract art in Canada, simplified the visual field in his paintings, and counter-intuitively, they became more complex. A clue to the complexity of radical simplification is Voice of Fire, the Barnett Newman painting that has animated a heated debate in Canada since its display at Expo 67. Tousignant saw Newman’s paintings much earlier and in 1962 remarked, “I found space of dramatic beauty. It was exactly what I was trying to do in 1956: to say as much as possible with as few elements as possible.”[1] By 1965, paintings by both Newman and Tousignant were in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, New York—early recognition of Tousignant’s international reputation and a testament to their shared belief in the majesty of colour as form.
Quina-Phthalo from 1975 is an exceptionally large and rare “double 48” from Tousignant’s series of three-colour diptychs produced between 1972 and 1977. The format is unique to Tousignant: two identically sized circular canvases each with concentric bands of colour, the two paintings presented as a pair. This outstanding double painting is a subtle example of colour in its purest form. It reaffirms the artist’s belief that truly abstract art must not contain spatial illusions, and nothing quite eliminates spatial depth better than the circle. With this assertively flat shape, Tousignant can intensify his exploration of colour vibration and interaction in space, something he described as being more akin to an encounter, with each viewer rewarded for the time spent looking.
The three colours on each of the two paintings are unique, no two the same, with all six colours the product of hours spent patiently mixing and remixing pigments. Each colour maintains a certain stasis in the target format, and the matteness of the paint reinforces an almost immaterial reading, the smooth surface transporting viewers into a world of colour and light. For Tousignant, “Working directly with colours was a structural breakthrough.”[2] All spatial assessments, those dependent on figure-to-ground relationships, are eliminated. This rhythmic system allows colours when united by the eye to produce additional colours freed from the constraints of materiality—each newly generated colour available only in fleeting perceptual moments of contemplation.
Tousignant’s interest is in the junctures: colour against colour, painting beside painting, and colour on a wall. Attuned to the physiology of perception, he wanted to create “a system of relationships with multiple possibilities.”[3] Each painting exists separately, two things but seen holistically, not as isolated parts. The great achievement in Quina-Phthalo is the depth of Tousignant’s understanding of vision. The adjacent canvases feature two opposing motifs of concentric light-dark and dark-light colour band groupings. Each canvas in Quina-Phthalo has its own centre-to-surround colour organization to exploit peripheral vision. Unlike central vision, which preferences colour, peripheral vision gives greater emphasis to contrast and shape recognition. The human brain, however, devotes the largest percentage of its processing power to whatever is at the centre of our gaze. Colour differentiation and detail dominate central vision.
In Quina-Phthalo the two canvases may alternate their roles, but one will always be central and the other on the periphery. Vision operates to harmonize the two and in effect creates hyphens between bands of colours similar in tone, value or colour. And with that Tousignant has succeeded in taking viewers with him on a journey of discovery, stimulated by the pure sensations of colour, into chromatic space.
We thank Gary Dufour, adjunct associate professor at the University of Western Australia since 2013, for contributing the above essay. A modern and contemporary art specialist, Dufour was formerly the senior curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1988 – 1995) and chief curator / deputy director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia (1995 – 2013).
1. Quoted in Danielle Corbeil, Claude Tousignant (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1973), exhibition catalogue, 14.
2. Quoted in Michael White, “Two Painters Stage Major Exhibits,” Gazette (Montreal), May 26, 1973.
3. Corbeil, Claude Tousignant, 16.
Please note: this work is unframed.