Sold for: $31,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie Agnès Lefort, Montreal
Canadian Art, Joyner, May 13, 1994, lot 135
Private Collection, Toronto

In 1964, after a period where he had focused exclusively on printmaking, Gaucher returned to painting with a bang. Rather than the heavy, organic forms that appeared in his earliest paintings, these new works were characterized by flat fields of colour; crisp, hard-edged lines; and rapid, dashed points. The first group of canvases to emerge from his new system of painting was the Square Dance series: kinetic, diamond shaped compositions, the “signals” of small squares seem to leave contrasting afterimages as the eye explores the canvas. Gaucher, like other post-Plasticen artists Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant, would frequently be considered to be making Op Art, but this was a characterization the Montreal artists rejected. Instead of a purely aesthetic experience, Gaucher had interest in the dynamics of colour, and its capacity to explore the energetic structures underlying human consciousness. The Square Dance series, with its calculated vectors and spritely movements that seem to recall the step patterns of a dance, teeter precariously between mechanical symmetry and rhythmic, dynamic energy.

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