Ramage

 
When he painted Ramage in 1956, Paul-Émile Borduas was on the verge of taking what he would later call in his letters “a simplifying leap”—that is, a move toward black and white. “But Borduas’s black-and-white paintings are inconceivable unless he takes possession of the actual pictorial surface,” wrote the art historian François-Marc Gagnon. Thus, this painting, produced at the beginning of his stay in Paris, bears both the influential marks of American Abstract Expressionism and those of his eventual detachment from it. In its wake are the oil-on-canvas works Jardin d’hiver (1955–56, collection of Pierre Lassonde) and La grimpée (1956, collection of the National Gallery of Canada), which are among the most revelatory pieces from this transformational period in Borduas’s career.
 
From the outset, the composition of Ramage emphasizes the impetuous movement of mass, the suppleness, and the complete freedom that are part of the skill behind Borduas’s New York paintings. Here, with finesse and agility, he manages to achieve a certain offhanded quality in his execution of the work. Our gaze is drawn in from all sides, as much toward the periphery as toward the centre, where an amalgam of impastos yields bursts of pure pigment that range from red to bright green to lemony yellows and Sienna browns. Reinforcing the whole are creamy whites that help to expand the space between the successions of colour. The result is curving, twisting movements in which the entire surface seems animated by chirps and the flutter of wings, which perfectly conveys the spirit of this piece. Indeed, ramage is the sound of warbling birds in trees, but also a bunch of branches or foliage, or an arabesque design. A rare vestige of this brief period, Ramage embodies the evocative force and fragile balance of a painting in full bloom.
 
Once settled in his studio on rue Rousselet, in Paris, Borduas entered a period of intense creativity that led to numerous exhibitions and acquisitions, as well as a remarkable sale of paintings to the gallerist Martha Jackson. In addition, a visit from his friend and collector Gérard Lortie helped bring to fruition a retrospective of his abstract works from 1941 to 1956 at Toronto’s Gallery of Contemporary Art the following year. A few paintings from this 1956 group—including Chatoiement, Épanouissement, Le dégel, and Ramage[1]—were held back for an exhibition at Galerie Agnès Lefort in Montreal that took place from May 26 to June 7, 1958. The exhibition Cinq années de Borduas, another initiative by Lortie, provided an opportunity to assess the evolution of the formal themes in his work from his New York years to his latest breakthroughs. The exhibition drew many rave reviews, including one from Rodolphe de Repentigny, who saw in the 1956 body of work “a gravity of tone in which the pure primary colours—such as the red, the green, and the yellow—look like wounds even where there are just traces of them.” Needless to say, this observation also applies to Ramage, as testimony to the great metamorphoses that took place that year.
 
(Annie Lafleur)
 
[1] A list of 15 paintings was proposed in a letter addressed to Gérard Lortie on February 24, 1958, as well as on the shipping notice dated March 24, 1958. The exhibition Cinq années de Borduas included 17 paintings, as indicated by the journalist Robert Ayre in his review published in The Star on May 24, 1958.