After leaving the traditional curriculum at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal and encountering fellow Quebec artist Paul-Émile Borduas, Rita Letendre began to explore in her work the ethos and non-figurative approaches championed by the radical Automatist movement. For Letendre, the spontaneity and emotional immediacy of automatic abstraction offered a thrilling sense of liberation. She recalled that “representation suddenly seemed to me like a crutch. I had discovered that the soul of a painting was not in the object represented but in the way it transmitted a sort of internalized emotion.”

Although the Automatists were an influential force in the early development of her practice—marked by her inclusion in their final group exhibition in 1954—Letendre would ultimately forge a distinct visual language and fiercely intuitive oeuvre entirely her own.

Following the dissolution of the Automatists, her work entered a profoundly innovative phase, developing rapidly from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. These early abstractions dabbled in geometric structures and a spatial organization reminiscent of the Plasticiens’ grid compositions, yet she retained a sense of fluidity in her tonal layers and gestural tesserae. By the early 1960s, Letendre was in one of the most powerful periods of her career. Over the next three years, she would produce a series of paintings that synthesized her early formal experimentations with a steadfast commitment to emotional expression driven by self-reflection and discovery. The ordered grids of earlier works gave way to dramatic, converging forms and thick impasto, lit by flares of brilliant light that cut across dark, turbulent backgrounds.

While her works remained resolutely non-representational, Letendre resisted the term [design: italic] non-figurative, which she felt implied an absence or lack—art defined by what it was not, rather than what it was. To her, [design: italic] expressionism better captured the vital urgency of her practice: a propulsive effort to externalize emotional force, to connect to the innermost facets of the self and conjure the primordial energies of the natural world—its growth and expansion, regenerative cycles, fervent vitality and resilience. In short, Letendre sought to connect to the very pulse of life, in all its forms and intensities.

By 1962, the tension within her surfaces had intensified; gestural forms and vibrant colours converged with increasing force, culminating in rich, riotous canvases such as this exceptional 1962 work. Letendre assigned her titles intuitively and only after completion—responding to the sensed atmosphere of the overall work rather than letting preconceptions inform the trajectory of its creation. Intro-perspective suggests the impulse of introspection—an inward gaze as a necessary act of self-discovery—and evokes the internal excavation that lies at the heart of Letendre’s process of transmuting emotion into form.

Sparks of crimson and garnet impasto radiate towards an incandescent core—a molten ore of churning gold—kindled atop swathes of ochre, glowing as embers beneath flame. A vertical flare of red erupts upward: a luminous, volcanic burst of vital energy. The composition conjures a sense of tectonic movement, evoking the layered strata of the Earth, the energies brewing in the depths below, the rich core of the inner self, and the volatile bursts of emotion, intuition, desire and inspiration that may ignite when unearthed. Produced during this pivotal era of transformation, Intro-perspective stands as a singular expression of Letendre’s ever-evolving and exploratory career, capturing the jubilant momentum of an artist in the midst of creative discovery.