Free Jazz Yellow

Swiss by birth, Canadian by adoption, painter and master engraver Francine Simonin has enjoyed an international, prolific career for more than fifty years. Working in series, the artist develops one body of work after another with coherence, freshness, audacity, and a constantly evolving visual language. An acrylic dated 2006, Free Jazz Yellow is part of a micro-series of four works of the same size with an off-white background and predominantly marked by yellows, reds, blacks, and whites, some with highlights of cobalt blue. Directly related to Jardins (2003) and Jardins jaunes (2004), which opened the way to the series Ocean Beach, Salut Michaux, and Variante d’une variation (2005–06), Free Jazz Yellow stands out for its primary colours and impassioned gesturality, and for the perfect mastery of technique and subject. This painting can be read as an experimental musical score, with its half notes (white), quarter notes (black), and eighth notes, while the brush strikes wildly at the canvas, taut as a drum skin. For Simonin, artistic expression unfailingly goes hand-in-hand with how she encounters the world, and her art is thus the product of an entirely physical experience.