winsor gallery

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Fifty years after the event, and despite constant innovation, Marcel Barbeau remains faithful to the ideals of the first Canadian manifesto, signed in 1948 by the pioneers of abstract art, the Automatists. The Refus Global sought to liberate Canadians from the oppressive forces of church and government and to reject the restrictions imposed on art by all forms of academicism. Barbeau has remained one of Automatism’s most experimental figures, to the extent that his experiments led him beyond any particular movement and into a style which can only be defined as uniquely his own.

Paint, ink and collage are amongst the mediums he uses, while his methods include sculpture, performance works and film. His output is perhaps unusually multi-directional. Yet his art has always been concerned with the relationship of forms and colours in space and with the sense that each piece contains its own dynamics and deconstruction. In Barbeau’s painting, a constant metamorphosis occurs as the eye registers relationships between complimentary and dissonant forms and colours. While each coloured shape is independently eye-catching, its properties seem to change when we consider the composition as a whole. Depending on our perspective, forms project, retreat, attract and repel one another, become volumes or voids, whilst individual changes in the colour or position of a form, or the framing of the whole composition, can alter an image entirely. Consequently, it is no longer valid to think of colour as separate from form; of the object as separable from the space in which it is located. It becomes clear that the paintings do not refer to anything outside of themselves; they are not symbols or representations.

Marcel Barbeau was born in Montreal in 1925. He studied at the École du meuble, where he met Paul-Emile Bordaus and several other young artists and joined the Automatistes. Throughout his career, Barbeau has traveled extensively, living and exhibiting in Europe and the United States. As an instrumental player in the birth of Canadian abstract art, Marcel Barbeau has been granted many prestigious awards and distinctions, including an election to the order of Canada. His works are in many private, public and corporate collections in Canada, in the United States and in Europe among which are: the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the British Museum (London), Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Strasbourg, France), the Chrysler Art Gallery (Norfolk, Virginia), the Lyon Museum of Fine Arts (Lyon, France), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal), the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (Montreal), Quebec National Fine Arts Museum (Quebec), the Rose Art Museum,(Waltham, N.J.) and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).