Sauvage-furie ou Automne-délire

Marcel Barbeau’s all-over compositions are among his most accomplished and avant-garde. The very first pieces appeared in the second half of the 1940s; standing out among them was the flamboyant Sauvage-furie ou Automne-délire (Savage-Fury or Autumn Delirium), dated 1947. Art historian Roald Nasgaard wrote about this work, “In this little painting, Barbeau not only held his usual emotionality in check but laid down his strokes of the spatula in a regular, repetitive, quasi-mechanical ordering. For the year 1947 such work is quite without precedent, not only for the degree to which it sacrifices all but the vestiges of automatic spontaneity but also because of its indifference to composition vis-à-vis the framing rectangle.” Here, Marcel Barbeau has created a true plastic manifesto, a precursor to the pictorial explorations that would soon push the visual arts in Quebec and Canada irreversibly toward modernity.
Indeed, this masterpiece definitively marks the genesis of the Automatistes, whose works were in many ways indebted to it. It is also a rare painting from 1947, which escaped the mass destruction of his oeuvre the following year. Enlivened by superb shimmering and transparency where the paint is scraped down to the canvas, this piece anticipates Paul Émile Borduas’s works in oil of the mid-1950s and Marcelle Ferron’s works of the late 1950s, if only for its quality of light, which shapes and sweeps the surface in a bold, mature, implacable gesture.
With Sauvage-furie ou Automne-délire, Barbeau’s palette brightens: blacks give way to radiant whites, which illuminate the entire surface. This pure contrast, enhanced with blue, red, and green pigments, enables him to push his work to the limits of all-over painting and tachism, up to then rarely explored. A tensile network of palette-knife strokes sweeps into the fray in a lateral thrust, while dabs of bright colour joyfully punctuate this embattled checkerboard. The oblique orientation of the markings lends great density to the dazzling and eminently expressive baroque surface.
Here is an essential, historic work for the audacious collector— assured and singular, like Barbeau himself.