Boléro

In 1980, Toupin returned to the hautes pâtes, or thick impasto, of his Matierist work, which he had briefly abandoned. During the 1980s, he was inspired by music to create paintings and etchings, sometimes in several panels, following the structure of symphonic movements. In Boléro (1985)—also the title of the ballet music for orchestra by Maurice Ravel—the pictorial composition seems to interpret the first measures of the musical theme, like a material score made of a single piece. Concerning Götterdämmerung (1986), inspired by Richard Wagner’s musical drama Twilight of the Gods, Charles Bourget speaks of “a real gesturality in trompe-l’oeil form,” in which the painting, at each stage of its realization, is “controlled, planned, organized, and adjusted in the same manner as [the artist’s] geometric works” (Fernand Toupin, L’arpenteur des grands espaces : Peinture : 1953-2000, Éditions Mus’Art, 2003). Toupin produced a sketch and a small pochade before transposing the spans of colour and textured areas onto the canvas using a grid system.