Marcel Barbeau’s all-over compositions are among his most accomplished and avant-garde works. The very first pieces appeared in the second half of the 1940s; standing out among them was the remarkable Rosier-feuilles, from 1946. Here, Barbeau has created a true plastic manifesto, a precursor to the pictorial explorations that would soon push the visual arts in Québec and Canada irreversibly toward modernity. Indeed, this masterpiece marks the genesis of the Automatistes, whose works were in many ways indebted to it. It is also one of only a few paintings from 1946 that escaped Barbeau’s massive purge two years later, when he destroyed many of his canvases. Enlivened by superb scratching and transparency effects where the paint is scraped down to the canvas, this piece bears a resemblance to Marcelle Ferron’s works of the same period, if only for its quality of light, which shapes and sweeps the surface in a bold, mature, implacable gesture.
With Rosier-feuilles, Barbeau’s palette brightens: blacks give way to radiant whites, which illuminate the entire surface. This pure contrast, enhanced with blue and green pigments, enables him to push the boundaries of the all-over technique, up to then rarely explored. A tensile network of palette-knife strokes sweeps into the fray in a lateral thrust, while dabs of cool colours joyfully punctuate the embattled bush referred to in the title. For the audacious collector, this is an essential and historic piece—as unclassifiable as Barbeau himself.
