Claude Tousignant

Canadian, b. 1932

Diptych, 1979

acrylic on canvas

259 cm

Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Gift of the artist

G-96-50 ab

Categories:

Painting, Canadian Modern (1910-1979)

Since emerging from Montreal’s fecund and innovative art scene in the mid-1950s, Claude Tousignant has directed his creative effort toward producing monumental, hard-edge abstract paintings. Like his colleagues Guido Molinari and Yves Gaucher, Tousignant’s approach is reductive, geared toward vindicating the painted canvas as an object itself, rather than simply as a means to pictorial illusion. In Diptych, which was part of a series of circular monochromes the artist began in 1978 and revisited through to the early 1990s, anything that could invoke the world outside the painted surface itself is eradicated. The paintings—through their shared scale, reverberating shapes, and colour nuances—aim at commandeering the viewer’s senses and creating an atmosphere of meditation through perception.