Additional Images

Provenance:

Galerie de Siècle, Montreal
Sale of Art, The Women’s Committee of the Art Gallery of Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:

Sarah Filmore, (ed.), Jacques Hurtubise, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, 2011, pages 21-128.

Note:

Dubbed an “enfant terrible of the Quebec art scene,” Jacques Hurtubise has challenged our preconceptions about painting from the outset. Though a member of Quebec abstractionism: the Automatistes and the Plasticiens, his work stands out as the anomaly amidst his contemporary Quebec artists. In comparison to their rational and elegant permutations of abstraction, Hurtubise’s paintings cut like a knife through the currents of intellectualism running through the majority of the abstract works being produced at the time. Instead, Hurtubise created large scale works that were not only a feat of imagination, but also of physical labour.

Regardless, each painting is a confrontation, both with the self and the processes of creation. Hurtubise has said that he “would like to create paintings that overcome me to the point of fear,” and this tension is evident in the agitated yet visibly controlled brushwork that seems to almost slice the canvas into myriad pieces. His painting Nuit Insondables is an example of this technique. In this work, the sharp fragments of jagged and starkly black and white lines create a dramatic contrast. Notorious for flattening the picture plane, Hurtubise subverts, and even denies our sensory expectation. This disjunction between coherence and aesthetic discord can also be understood as his way of making the familiar, unfamiliar.