Lot 858 D

"Colours and forms of an always-evocative landscape which reflects his temperament, dominate Riopelle's pictorial imagination and are basic elements in his work. He finds them together in his feelings and memory; he senses them as figurative symbols of his various moods. The man is so overpowered and permeated by colour and form that he uses them with passionate ferocity in his painting, like a flow of words which alternatly reveals all that is both violent and gentle in his being. There is a constant relationship between the spiritual moods of the painter and his interpretation of the most uninhibited and primitive characteristics of seasons and of natural forms: his paintings seem to capture the mood of impenetrable woods, of lands without horizons and without sky. There is a sudden explosion when water and plant life, frozen throughout a very long winter, suddenly blossom into a myriad-coloured profusion where the light is alternately dazzling bright or tenderly and softly transparent. There are lightning flashes in the deep woods, charred trunks, unfolding leaves, quivering in the warm light after a storm, a patchwork of snow and earth; all these components of romantic landscape are rendered, not as special effects, but instead as the very essence of the subject." (Franco Russoli, Jean-Paul Riopelle in: Jean-Paul Riopelle, 31 International Biennal of Art, Ausst.Kat., Vence 1962, S.2)