In the works of Rita Letendre, painter of Abenaki and Quebec origin born in Drummondville, we find a fascination for color and light. In the decade 1953 to 1963, when the Automatistes and the Plasticiens dominated the Montreal artistic scene, Letendre produced a non-figurative pictorial work based on touches of color whose materiality we can clearly feel and which, juxtaposed to each other, create often expressionist structures and forms. At that time, although many abstract artists preferred the designation Untitled, Letendre used titles that convey emotional content. Letendre’s screen-printed Hard Edge images from the late 1960s and through the 1970s have something of imaginary landscapes (Into Night and Sharas). These works, emblematic of the artist’s mature production, in the form of arrows or beams of light, gradually seem to be built from a horizon line and to continue their course beyond the field of the painting.

Collection MNBAQ