PROVENANCE
Acquired from the Art Gallery of Hamilton Art Sales Service by the present Private Collection, Winnipeg, early 1960s

EXHIBITED
Musée du Québec, Quebec City, Pellan, September 7 – October 8, 1972, traveling in 1972 – 1973 to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, catalogue #135

Of the major figures from Canada’s transnational 1950s breakthrough era of abstraction, the artist who maintained the most consistent connection to surrealism was Quebec’s Alfred Pellan. Surrealism was especially present in Quebec’s particular strain of abstraction, with automatic drawing and painting being a key means of early exploration for several artists. Paul Emile Borduas, for example, eagerly explored these non-rational conceits, which sometimes express themselves in his intellectually confounding titles such as Des paysans miment des anges, whose English approximation might be Peasants Mimicking Angels. Produced at the same pivotal moment as Borduas’ breakthroughs, Pellan produced this work, Jardin étang. Its title could translate to Garden Pond, and in it organic forms resembling leaves of kelp, molluscs, or single celled organisms complete with flagella populate the composition. With the palpable sense of a living system, it’s as though Pellan’s fantasia blends a seabed of oceanic lifeforms with the microcosmos teaming in a single drop of water. Playful, strange, and always riotous with colour, Pellan’s paintings can feel like intuitively remembered dreams abiding by their own internal, unknowable logic, appearing curious and welcoming at once.

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