Art Reviews: Montreal, New York, Your Town.

The reason I went to Quebec last week-end was barely for the David Blatherwick installation, and neither for the very critiqued "De Millet À Matisse" exhibition.


I mostly wanted to see the Rita Letendre`s "In The Colors Of The Day" retrospective. Yes mam ! The first retro that I ever saw from her apart from a semi-retrospective at galerie Simon Blais that I had the chance to witness a few years ago. My first impression entering the unique room of this...errr... "retrospective?" was my deception that it was so small. I knew there was going to be some good works, but I wanted more of this. In case you don`t know who she is, Rita Letendre is a worldwide reknown painter that lived 30 years in Toronto and elsewhere but was born in Drummondville, Quebec from abenaquis ascendance, and now lives in Longueil, Montreal) Someone once argued that Letendre was probably the only painter from Quebec that never made one bad painting. I`m tempted to believe him, though her style may not please to detractors of the abstract.

I was surprised by the way the tableaux were all mixed up, not respecting any chronology or "themes". I was wrong: they were all arranged following the natural spectrum of colors, and I`m dumb to not have realized this myself, though I did notice they had pulled all the black and white canvases into a tiny triangular cubicle in the middle of the room. May I comment on the logistic here for a sec ? They made a fantassstic job !! General public is so lazy when comes the time to contemplate art: the organizers had pared to this by installing a great quantity of armchairs around the center cubicle so we could sit and watch the paintings at ease. Then, the tableaux were marked with large dates on the walls so we could infer the chronology ourselves as we moved along. It took a second to just turn your head around and notice the 8 or 9 different "periods" of the artist (at least represented here). I wrote to these people and lend a bravo, I really had a great time in Quebec.

Now, speaking about the works..hmmm... I`m not a poet, I don`t even master the english language (I`m not english, in case you wonder), and I`m writting here the way I speak exactly because I`m not supposed to do it like this. So I won`t attempt at assembling all sorts of fancyful words describing the style and emotion and joy and dynamism and blabla, that emanate from Letendre`s paintings. Everyone else does that !! Me, I am selecting 7 important groups that I decipher from the artist`s chronology and I`ll see if I can add any personal interpretations to my feeble attempts at describing them.


1) "Casser De La Géométrie" (breaking some geometry: bundles of rectangles):

This first period underlines Rita Letendre`s decision of separating herself from the Quebec "Automatist" movement, and explore geometry (she affirms she owes a lot to Borduas, whom taught her to "find herself through her art"). The oldest work "Ressac" (1954), is simply a panoply of small white, grey and dark "touches" that ressembles tiny vertical rectangles. You could get a sense that a rock had been splattered by water, if you insisted in reading anything into the title. "Jazz À Amsterdam" (1953-55) and "Adieu Sezame" (1955) are both series of perpendicularly superimposed rectangles, both colored and black and white, the first one being much more dense and filled than the second. The title of "Adieu Sezame" seems to wave a goodbye to the Automatists that first welcomed her. These small tableaux with kaki backgrounds and lost of white, really belong to the 60`s and jazz music, but they are unfortunately emptied of a "voice", of a "personality", since they are comparable to any similar geometric artwork provided by quantities of artists from the period. The solarized pastels in "Épouse Fébrile" (1956) are already much more pleasing to the eyes (the squares are now loose and applied as brush strokes on a white background), but they look too much like a copycat of Marcelle Ferron. Somehow, regardless of what theorists say, Letendre was still searching for her style here.


2) Grotesque Orientalism.

It`s hard to describe these paintings, but finally we get a sense of a personality. We recognize a style. "Tropiques II" and "Augure" (both from 1961) are very similar: they both contain two black oily "serpentine" structures (painted linearly but with contours in "zig-zags"), layed over or under other criss-crossing color serpentines bursting at precise points. Mostly red, green, orange and brown surrounding dark oily forms. You could be above a japanese or chinese palace. Or they could spouse the contours of oriental lamps. The term "orientalism" is not from me, it is indicated in the exhibition. The texts refer to a ressemblance with methods of asian calligraphy. "Tsiyah" (1963) is actually from another "sub-period", the "Israel" period, where she used a spatule and mixed large masses of "dark oil" with portions of other colors like here the brown at the base that whirls into the shape of a bowl. I`m supposing she only used blacks and browns during that period (?) The painting holds an iconous,quai religious, feel. A golden bowl against a black background is a powerful image, even if I made it all up myself (!). Apparently, the large dynamic gestures that mainly consisted the technique employed here, are the base of the following "period", which will gain her a certain recognition.


3) Wrestling Masses.

No more ambiguous forms, no more details that could let us infer any figure, this is minimalist abstraction at its purest, or almost. Rita Lentendre simply decided to present dark masses, squares, rectangles, that are entering the canvas plane and deforming into some sort of "battle" one against the other, like in a game of attraction and repulsion. The first example shown, "Drift" (1964), is a timid encounter between a white/grey mass at the bottom that gets mixed up with the upper dark. As we move through the years, the contours of these masses will become better defined and often corners will "point rageously" and expand toward the field of impact. "Espaces Changeants" (1964, a cute little green and black canvas), "Impact" (1964) and "Chock" (1966) are all "battles" between 2 or 3 black masses surrounded by a unique color: greenlime in the first one, violent red in the second, and white in the third canvas (she seems to intermittently return to black and white throughout her career). "Chock" exactly looks like a Borduas in which black masses would magnetically react to each others. The rather raw, brutal, and minimalist approach of this period will not please to everyone. The concept is firm and irreprochable, and that is probably how and why miss Lentendre got respected for them. But for art`s sake, if you permit one opinion, it`s a good thing she moved on. "Espace" (1967) is reducing the confrontation to two hard-edged black "triangles" or "arrows" on white facing each others, what directly announced the next phase of the artist.


4) The Prismatic Arrows:

The arrows represent the height of Rita Lentendre`s career, the period for which she will gain the most reconnaissance and success. In design they correspond to an age when the "pseudo-futuristic" ideals of the 50`s and 60`s were finally taking shapes. New materials and colors like plastic and fluorescent orange (or fluo-anything) were in vogue, as much as principles of aerodynamism (car shapes, etc...). In the age of spacecraft housing, everything needed to look sharp, and I don`t know to what conscious level Rita Letendre participated into this, but sure thing is that her flamboyant canvases from the period corresponded to this "new age" aesthetic. Speaking of "new age", simply the figure of light prism is already charged with esoterical meaning. Not that Rita is a sorceress of any kind, that was probably just coincidental, but as possible as it is with anything abstract, I wouldn`t ridicule anyone inferring the sublime into them. The flabbergasting thing about these tableaux is that they each look very clear and pure, respecting precise hard-edges, color tones and contrasts. They look like the better studies or explorations of airport designs from the 70`s. But while some of them look "classy" and "intemporal" (the darker colored ones, like "Lumière Boréale Ou Northern Lights" (1968), "Pulsation" (1970) or "Midnight Light" (1970)), other look quite 70`s and kitsch, like they couldn`t have been made in any other period (the later brightness of "Sharav II" (1973) and "Sadeh" (1974)). But why not ? Why do we find certain color arrangements so extreme ? I am certain that with all the amount of arrows Rita had produced in her life, that she simply explored any spectrum of colors and tones possible. Their titles reveal that they function like prisms because they often refer to proprieties of light. Altogether, as one major framework, the arrows are both fragmenting (decoding) and symbolizing the matter of "light". And the edges are painted too, affirming the expansion of the canvases: each tableau work as its own "center of the universe", each one is nearing the point de chute of a different dimension. They are no planes, these "lasers" absorb everything. They`re "light holes" (contrarely to dark holes). "Sun Song" (1969) sports two arrows but they are like geminis of the same substance. Every design is slick and enclosed within a logic. This is some of the best work you will find worldwide covering the 70`s. Rita Letendre deserves her place in the dictionaries only for those.


5) The Lost Highways:

Another great period, getting toward the public-friendly. Letendre has reduced her arrows to thin perspectives that functions like "paths", while she has developed a new technique, using the "aerograph" (aerosol paint) to create dense and coloured atmospheres, often involving a few different layers on top of each others. "Oradek" (1976) is the masterpiece here, the largest in the exhibition, and send hints at the larger works that Lentendre had been commissioned to produce by many large corporations during the 70`s and 80`s . The painting is all dense and fluffy browns, with a grey and orange sharp path at the bottom. Someting is said on the board about Letendre "not seeking to represent the colors of the season, but the infinity of emotions". I see pictures like "Aura" (1979, this one is blue-cold) and "The Dream Of The Midsummer Night`s Dream" (1981, this one is flamboyant orange, the path loosing itself toward the right), as being the continuation of one single path: instead of presenting multiverses, like with the arrows, Letendre now seems to signify her ability to cross any of them. These works function like stations. The paths, or lasers, or "light crossings", look like they acknowledge the passing of time, such that the visitor cannot stand for eternity in front of them, but that they invite to pause momentarely for contemplation.


6) The Blurred Scapes:

I consider this period to be the most public-friendly of Rita Letendre`s oeuvre.
They simply consist of layers of smooth "aerograph" paint apposed on top of each others, playing with contrasts and shapes so they look like dense atmospheric scapes from strange dreams or remote planets. The previous "paths" have become darker sections that evoke a far horizon. "Voltan`s Dream" (1983) is an early black and white tentative that is less interesting (just an horizontal column of white blurring over black), but "An Awakening" (1984), with its dark orange lifting up at the horizon, or "Arctic Sun" (1990), which actually looks like an effect of heat buiding into a desert mirage, reach both ethereal climaxes, and makes you crave for scrutinizing them over and over again. I realize from the titles that many of these paintings seems to be about the sun, or more precisely, the sunlight. Like the blue azur of earth`s sky, atmospherical gazes are only visible through the light of the sun. Thus these works might function as monuments or homages to light. Nevertheless: top notch, kick-ass, quality stuff, that is all I can say. And it is great to realize that these 3 tableaux represent a rather long moment in the career of the artist. I am even surprised we haven`t seen more of them around here.


7) The violence of colors: fluxus.

Like many others, I am not certain I understand, or appreciate the recent move of the artist. It seems that after years of being ethereal and soporific, she decided to break a tempest into her work, and started using oil and gestures again, perhaps to reaffirm the position of the body in an age when all slick designs are computerized.
One is tempted to argue that the recent paintings focus on the "process", though Rita will paint incesssently until she gets the "right result". You might hate the figures I use to describe them, but for a starter, "Fandango" (1998) exactly looks like a violent grey sky in which a thunder is roaming (the intermittent red gristles). The method is already evident: she mixes colors in huge and dynamics zig-zags across the plane. The end result looks like impossible basic "elements", such as very colorful fires or water surfaces. "Kyril" (2000) bursts with a lot of red in the middle, coming out the green and dark colors of the background. But I think the artist`s aim is that these colors are actually intertwined. Instead of a battling of masses like in her early period, she now proposes battling of colors, which are not exactly battles but more like "cascades" of joy if you will, or "explosions of life", which is how Letendre often describe these recent works. The last example of those is shown in "Les Couleurs De L`Émotion" (2001), a film by late Michel Moreau (who died recently of alzheimer, a film exists about him too), and which in 49 minutes follows Letendre`s creation of a new painting for a concourse in Baie St-Paul, which if I`m not mistaken, she won. The film is not to be missed, they invite to consider the pertinency of what Lentendre has been doing in recent years, demonstrating how she paints over and over a canvas until she gets the "right" colors and emotions. This said, regardless of all the "strum und drang" theories, I find her recent material doesn`t distinguish Letendre as much as her previous. Sometimes too much emotion is like not enough.


Ok...Let`s try pick up one favorite painting per period to resume the show:
the trophies go to "Épouse Fébrile" (1956), as bright as a Matisse, than
"Tropiques II" (1961), that just looks cool (but anything is great in that period, I loved Tsiyah too), "Impact" (1964), because it`s violent and best represents her concept, "Sharav II" (1973), because it`s really flamboyant, but I`m not sure if I preferred Sadeh or this, "The Dream Of The Midsummer Night`s Dream" (1981) because I luv that orange, "Arctic Sun" (1990), because it mysticizes me, and the work in the video "Les Couleurs De L`Émotions" (2001), because the process is shown and I think the new work is all about process.


As I said, I had a marvellous time in Quebec,


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan


Ps1: Run see the show !!! You still have time it ends on the 3rd of April.
http://www.mdq.org should get you there. Take a stroll into the citadel before coming back.

PS2: Gimme a week to come back to the Millet-Matisse exhibit, I`m returning to visit Blain at Uqam, and another exhibit at Dazibao, that I intend to write about here.