Claude Tousignant
Montreal Plasticien of concentric circles in colours that will not sit still.
Claude Tousignant was born in Montreal in 1932 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts there and in Paris. He became a central figure of the Plasticiens, the Quebec movement that pushed abstraction towards hard-edged geometry and away from the gestural Automatisme that had preceded it. From 1962 he made the Gongs: circular canvases carrying concentric rings of flat, saturated colour, calibrated so that the eye cannot rest and the disc appears to vibrate and rotate. He has continued to work in Montreal with monochromes, reliefs and installations for six decades.
A Canadian market, principally Montreal and Toronto, where he is a major post-war figure with strong institutional representation. The circular Gongs of the 1960s lead. Their condition is unusually decisive: the works depend on immaculate flat acrylic surfaces and precisely painted edges, the circular format makes any distortion of the stretcher obvious, and retouching on flat unmodulated colour is effectively impossible to hide. Later monochromes and reliefs form the broader market. Works are normally signed, titled and dated on the reverse.
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