Untitled

Marcelle Ferron returned to painting around 1985, having lost none of her passion. This untitled painting, produced in 1988, shows a vast expanse of glowing red topped by a bluish wash, the one separated from the other by a verdant strip of land and a proliferation of frenetic black, yellow, and turquoise strokes and patches. One immediately thinks of a kind of tribute to Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows (1890), or, due to its verticality and calligraphic quality, to a reminiscence of the artist’s trip to China and Japan. If some of Ferron’s titles and compositions of the period (and in the following decade) suggest a degree of figuration, her gut pictorial instinct remained the language of abstraction.