A signal must be emitted before the receiver captures it; the latter, in fact, is a key element in Yves Gaucher’s formal vocabulary. In Signals—Eight Inch Progressions, a simple, minimal language relies on horizontal lines whose length, number, and colour are constrained to a spectrum of tonalities akin to a musical score. The perfect symmetry of the linear network—bounded on the left and the right, then above and below, by coloured bands—creates an optical tension in the colour field. It is an “energy field,” writes Bernard Teyssèdre, that distributes high and low frequencies, the pinks and pastel blues, on a superb background of mustard yellow. This chromatic tension generates a kind of optical reversibility between the lines and colours, such that “the spectator’s creative participation,” as Gaucher conceives it, imparts a performative quality to the paintings in the Signals/Silences series. Under the tight orchestration of colour-elements, we thus make out vibrant, almost dancing linear streaks, set into motion by an “expansive or contractive force on the colour fields.” This painting was exhibited by two influential and legendary gallery owners of the 1960s: Martha Jackson, in New York, in 1966, and Agnès Lefort, in Montreal, in 1967.
Born in Montreal in 1934, Yves Gaucher studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal from 1954 to 1956. Expelled from the school, he continued his training with printmaker Albert Dumouchel until 1960. He won a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts in 1962, which enabled him to travel to Europe. Starting 1963, he was represented by galle- ries in Montreal, Toronto, and New York, where he obtained his first solo exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery. The same year, still in New York, the Museum of Modern Art acquired In Homage to Webern No. 2, thereby launching his international career. In 1964, returning to painting, as well as to colour, Gaucher temporarily abandoned printmaking. In 1966, he participated in the 33rd Venice Biennale and became an assistant professor at the school of fine arts at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal. Gaucher was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1973. In the early 1990s, he returned to printmaking, relief, and materiality. He died in Montreal in 2000.
