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Rue Drolet,
Montréal
1936
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
20 x 25,5 cm |
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Rue Wiseman,
Outremont
1942
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
41 x 30,5 cm |
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Scène
de rue, sous le Cap, Québec
1958
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
25,5 x 20 cm |
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Nature morte
1940
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
51 x 102 cm |
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Autoritratto
1962
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
122 x 51 cm |
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Parade
1963
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
122 x 183 cm |
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Éblouissement
1967
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
76 x 102 cm |
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Paysage
1963
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
122 x 213 cm |
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Composition
1964
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
61 x 46 cm |
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Imagination
1998
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
91,5 x 122 cm |
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Composition,
songe
1988
Huile sur toile
Oil on canvas
75 x 71 cm |
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Mouvements
1975
Médiums mixtes
Mixed media
91,5 x 122 x 2 cm |
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Dans les
Laurentides
1973
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
61 x 76 cm |
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Peinture
et mosaïque
1961
Médiums mixtes
Mixed media
41 x 30,5 cm |
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Relief sur
fond blanc no3
1988
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
76 x 61 x 8 cm |
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Mouvements
sur fond gris vert
1974
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
68,5 x 137 cm |
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Accents noirs
sur fond vert
1981
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
40,5 x 30,5 x 2,5 cm |
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Composition
avec collages
1975
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
101,5 x 76 x 1,5 cm |
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Entourage
1982
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
61 x 46 x 6 cm |
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Montage sur
fond vert
1979
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
30,5 x 40,5 x 4 cm |
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Composition
no 2
1978-1979
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
76 x 61 x 5 cm |
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Composition
1970-1971
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
51 x 41 x 7 cm |
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Et il y a
de la musique
1978-1980
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
61 x 51 x 7,5 cm |
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Composition
no 1
1978-1979
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
122 x 91,5 x 8,5 cm |
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Composition
arthitectural
1980
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
61 x 51 x 7,5 cm |
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Bien assis
1981-1982
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
61 x 51 x 6 cm |
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Montage no
1
1979-1980
Matériaux et médiums mixtes
Mixed media
91,5 x 71 x 8 cm |
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The
work of Joseph Giunta, painter and constructor, extends over more than
sixty years of pictorial practice. From 1930 on, his work had its
finger on the pulse of the major movements that, throughout Europe and
America, founded the art of this century: surrealism, lyric
abstraction, automatism, “art brut”, geometrism, etc. The
evolution of his work also forged, as much through form and material as
through spirit, affinities with the work of certain artists such as
Antoni Tàpies, Pierre Soulages, Georges Braque and Hans Hartung.
So it is no accident that, in the historic lineage of a modern art that
saw its greatest masters deconstruct the system of figurative
representation inherited from the Renaissance, Joseph Giunta’s
painting took root very early in what is appropriately called
figuration, and then turned towards an abstract “manner”
that coincided with the belated blossoming of modernity in Quebec, if
not Canada. This abstraction gradually guided Giunta towards the
powerful geometric constructions he achieved during the 1980s, and
which forcefully highlighted the originality of a technique that
matched his profoundly contemporary creative thinking, with regard to
both process and final form.
Thus, privy to the formalist and gestural traits of modernity,
and more recently to the heterogeneity of postmodern practice,
Joseph Giunta’s work calls upon a multiplicity of
materials. His thick oil textures, collaged objects and
three-dimensional constructions respond to the material
appeal that also distinguishes other twentieth-century
artistic practices which award the canvas’s surface
primacy over the illusion of figurative depth that obfuscates
the impact of the plane’s pure pictoriality. We then
understand what Joseph Giunta means, declaring with the
utmost lucidity: “You must make a work of art and
not a picture.” But before allowing him to express
his convictions as a resolutely postmodern artist, this
“work of art” is first inscribed in the logical
sequence of a formal progression, the particularities
and phases of which we shall now examine, beginning with
his professional début in the 1930s.
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Even though, despite the serious
economic crisis, the 30s witnessed the first signs of
the primarily-European modern adventure, the Canadian
and Québécois contexts remained dominated
by the traditional order – namely, figuration, the
forefront of which was, without a doubt, landscape. This
genre reassured buyers, chilled by the Crisis, and, moreover,
consoled them in their sense of national identity, as
demonstrated by the Group of Seven’s popular northern
landscapes, among others.
In such an atmosphere, the young Joseph Giunta, who was nineteen in
1930, had no choice but to undertake his artistic career according to
what he saw around him, and to the ensuing influences. In terms of the
model of development typical of his century – beginning with
figuration and gradually evolving towards abstraction – he had
still to await the wake of the liberating shocks that Alfred
Pellan’s art and Paul-Émile Borduas’s automatism
would provoke the following decade. For the time being, Joseph Giunta
began painting as artists like Adrien Hébert, Clarence Gagnon,
Marc-Aurèle Fortin, Alexander Young Jackson, William Brymner,
Maurice Cullen and Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Côté
dominated the artistic scene, basing the realization of their efforts
on the renewal of old formulae like those of impressionism. ( 1)
Impressionism was probably at the origin of Giunta’s
paintings which were distinguished, still within the context
of representation, by a pre-eminence of material and colour
over line, a principle one finds to a much lesser degree
in, for example, Suzor-Côté and Maurice Cullen.
Indeed, unlike these painters, whose steadier strokes
accorded with the imperatives of a style of realism still
subject to chiaroscuro, Giunta displayed a will for vibration
that was expressed through strong chromatic contrasts
and strokes with the candour and freedom of those in paintings
by Marc-Aurèle Fortin, Tom Thomson and Arthur Lismer.
Moreover, the city theme Giunta exploited, characteristic
of cultural modernity in Quebec, differentiates him even
more from the landscapists of the same period. For example, Rue Drolet, Montréal (1936), Rue Wiseman,
Outremont (1942) and Scène de rue, sous
le Cap, Québec (1958) bear no relationship
to the conservative and nationalistic ideas very often
linked to the picturesque theme of the earth. Pictorially,
they declare more of an interest in texture than a concern
for realism, and hence foreshadow certain paintings that
would open the way to abstraction or, rather, to a time
when being modern in Quebec painting was “wanting
to be abstract”.(2)
Among these paintings, we shall recall two oils from 1940,
Violon and Nature morte,
painted on a single support which they share recto verso. On either
side, we are midway between figuration and abstraction; in the presence
of a few motifs like a violin, bottles and fruit, the play of surfaces
presented on the picture plane, the dilution of forms and a thick,
uniformly distributed texture contribute to the absence of the illusion
of depth, hence to an effect of planarity. Besides these factors, the
play of colour is achieved with no regard for the motifs’ usual
tones and, consequently, it also screens the realism.
This strategy continued to nourish Giunta’s compositions
until the late 50s while, by his own account, his reticence
about research beyond figuration was fading. Such investigations
would now constitute the greater part of the artist’s
gestural daring as, henceforth, he got involved in a mode
of painting that appeared lyrical, expressive and organic,
time and time again.
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It was around 1958, let us
recall, when Joseph Giunta began abandoning motif painting
and became interested in what his materials suggested,
and in collecting miscellaneous objects that would be
used in the collage-paintings, a genre he would practice
largely between 1974 and 1995. For the moment, he perceived
increasingly clearly openings that initially lent themselves
to non-figuration and, subsequently, abstraction.
This transition from figuration to non-figuration and
then to abstraction corresponded exactly with the evolution
of painting in Quebec in the crucial period from 1945
to 1960. (3)
As early as 1940, the adjective “non-representational” had
been used by Pellan
(4)
but it was soon replaced in critics’ and artists’
vocabulary with “abstract”. For his part, Joseph Giunta
began painting an initial category of paintings obfuscating direct
reference to the world, where he nevertheless kept certain indices of
figuration, and a second group in which any allusion to the objects of
reference disappears altogether, to the exclusive benefit of colour and
movement.
Autoritratto (1962) and Port de Montréal (1963) are fairly representative of the first category.
They share the effect of dark form over light ground that,
through subtle indices, still retains the idea of figurative
representation. For example, in Autoritratto (1962),
title notwithstanding, the painter allows us to recognize
only a head using a few strokes that coincide with the
morphology of the face at the top of the surface, while
the bottom part of the canvas is itself entirely bereft
of representative indices. If, by contrast, Port de
Montréal (1963) appears slightly more iconic
in its harbourlike structures, albeit through a white
associated more with sky, the painting still proposes
a formal and geometric interplay that, at the bottom of
the surface, emancipates itself outright from the imperatives
of realism. In relation to paintings of the same subject
by Adrien Gagnon executed some thirty years earlier, this
painting exuberantly shows how well Joseph Giunta studied
the lesson of modernism, namely the autonomous construction
of the pictorial surface. After Port de Montréal (1963), we need only look at Parade (1963) to be
convinced of this.
To this end, Éblouissement (1967) is a key
work insofar as it condenses at its core characteristics
coming from a more blatant transition towards abstraction.
Everything here is just freedom, gesturalism, colour,
impasto and pure pictoriality. Generous and colourful
materials do not facilitate the recognition of the form/ground
relationship, but the ensemble nevertheless gives the
impression of a floral motif. Despite this link with nature,
the painting displays the features of the more abstract
works that make up part of the second group from this
period: lyricism of movement, expressive planar construction
and organic appearance.
Paysage (1963) is another important work within this
group. Unlike Éblouissement (1967), described
above, Paysage is completely abstract. In establishing
its major axes and many entanglements according to chromatic
rules exclusive to the painting, Giunta inscribed it in
a very personal way within zones of lyricism and abstract
expressionism of which this is his finest example. In
so doing, he approached the earlier practice of such contemporaries
as Jean-Paul Riopelle, Marcelle Ferron and American painter,
Willem de Kooning, and distinguished himself from automatist
spontaneity and surrealist oneirism, with which he had
nothing in common.
The construction aspect which, despite its lyricism, affords
this picture structure, lies at the heart of another series
of works including Parade (1963) and Composition (1964). A certain abstract geometrism and a fragmentation
arising from soaring gesture prevail here. Giunta put
into play here more of an equilibrium between surfaces
while preserving a few expressive strokes, like an artist
seeking to scrutinize the rigour and objectivity of plasticians
like Fernand Toupin without for as much exercising their
principles. Moreover, the thick texture and collaged elements
in Parade (1963) clearly indicate the artist’s
predilection for thickness and his ontological incompatibility
with plastician purity.
From here on, it’s not surprising to observe the
organic appearance of a number of Giunta’s paintings,
also encountered in his most recent work, Imagination (1998) and Composition, songe (1988). For
instance, Mouvements (1975), extends an irregular
network of interlacing that evokes both fauna and flora.
The artist’s effort to abstract the world around
him is even more manifest when one compares the abstract
stretching in this painting to filaments rendering the
effect of snow in Dans les Laurentides (1973),
a representational work achieved two years later. Another
organic painting, Peinture et mosaïque (1961)
instead presents fragmentary material but on two levels:
one of white stains and one of round collages. To lyricism,
planar construction and organic interlacing, Joseph Giunta
would soon add many collages that further demonstrate
the originality of his work and his desire to construct
each canvas as an autonomous object.
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In a way that had been practiced selectively since the
60s, yet would around 1974 become a technique in itself,
one he practiced to the end of his life, Giunta amassed
objects to collage them into his paintings. Whether found
or belonging to him, these objects are as varied as they
are plentiful: corrugated cardboard, wire, (his wife’s)
jewellery, hats, string, balls, sand, nails, stones, metal
lattices, short sticks, candies, etc. To all these elements
he added carpet glue and cement to ensure overall cohesion.
The rich, uneven surface that resulted often looks like
a maquette of vernacular architecture: a topography of
mysterious places, networks of terrain, slopes, circuits
of communication, baroque house or, in the case of Relief
sur fond blanc no 3 (1988), multi-coloured alcove
where Giunta used, among other things, one of his hats.
When talking about these amalgams, which he had no hesitation
in constructing with an impulsive attitude, Giunta admitted
to working according to the attraction that his hat, candies,
pieces of string or lattices held for him, and also according
to the utility of the object to be collaged. However,
this utility in no way responded to imperatives predetermined
by some plan of action. Neither was it related to the
collaged object’s usual function. As in some works
by Antoni Tàpies, this utility was invented entirely
according to the needs of the moment; the hat would be
chosen for its contour or volume, it served as a niche;
marbles were inlaid to set a rhythm or simply for their
roundness; rope would mark rectilinear extensions, a periphery,
if not a network; candies suggested colourful flavor,
etc.
Indeed, in these collages, the function of every object
was diverted to the sole benefit of the painting in progress.
In this respect, Giunta was responding to a spirit we
rightly or wrongly call postmodern, and which has animated
the field of artistic practice for nearly twenty years;
the work was a series of events that set up its own rules.
(5)
Along these lines, the organic collage-paintings bear
an analogy with the biological model of epigenesis. Like
embryos, or in this case hats, the collage-paintings developed
through the successive differentiation of their new parts.
The artist departed from one element, added a second which
called for a third, the relationship of the first three
leading to a fourth, and so on. We can already envision
the expansiveness of a work like Mouvement sur fond
gris vert (1974), where whitish ramifications spreading
over a predominantly green ground have taken over from
the long brushstrokes of the expressionist paintings.
Insect, animal, rootlet, rhizome, veins – it matters
little; the signification of the painting is preponderant
in its solitary though immense presence. And this is enough.
Thus, in such moments of development, the collage found
relevance through a progression wherein the artist didn’t
think in terms of conscious or unconscious, but of instrument.
(6) So, if the postmodern position of Giunta’s canvases
can be paraphrased in terms of “the expression of
the artist’s subjectivity,” such subjectivity
wasn’t conceived through the simple presence of his
collaged hat or the potential illustration of his inner
identity but, on the contrary, was thought of as the result
of a set of unique and unrepeatable acts. Mirroring the
centre of Mouvement sur fond gris vert (1974),
the painter’s subjectivity sought to be the hub of
encounters. And therein nestles Giunta’s originality,
in his complicity with instruments.
The consequence of these actions was, of course, constructions
whose strength, apart from firm chromatic and formal harmonies,
was to multiply readings, the possibilities of which were
as numerous as the present materials and their arrangements.
For example, the very beautiful Accents noirs sur fond
vert (1981) et Entourage (1982) offer readings
that are both whole and fragmented, and do so on multiple
levels: topography, aerial view, electronic microcircuits,
riverbed, rhythm in red, organic tissue, tic-tac-toe game,
interior chasm of blue, etc.
Finally, in relation to many other collages like Composition
avec collages (1975), these canvases displayed a three-dimensional
rise that, pushed much further by the artist between 1971
and 1989, yielded a series of powerful and original works
that in themselves justify Joseph Giunta’s place
in the history of art in Quebec. Hence, we dedicate this
next section to the subject.
While sharing the materials, colours and textures of the
three prior groups of work, the constructions are distinguished
by several attributes that give them particular strength:
planar levels, cavities, baroque formalism and regular
rhythms. Built on sturdy Masonite supports, they present,
like architecture, a number of flat levels that are assembled
and fit together according to a new rhythm every time.
For this reason, our reading relies both on the play of
surfaces and on volumetric relationships, according to
the ambient lighting and, above all, our angle of vision,
whether frontal or oblique; this consequently multiplies
the painting’s levels of interpretation, and thus
its richness. Going along with this, Giunta added to the
complexity of the works’ various strata by systematizing
their titles. With regard to this, he stated, “Giving
evocative titles is unnecessary. I’m often content
with Construction no... You must give people with a lot
of imagination some hope.”
In the same order of ideas, a number of constructions possess
rectangular, round, triangular or oval cavities. Sometimes arranged as
cocoons containing who knows what mysterious small forms, or else
opened like vaginas, elsewhere recalling a floral perianth, often
rendered inaccessible with wire mesh, obscured in their recesses by a
dark, inky blue, these hollows afford as many openings in the picture.
These are understood both literally and figuratively; the cavities
physically breach the picture planes and, eliciting investigation, open
the “signification” of the work to a field of possibilities
and thereby a wealth of interpretations. Moreover, Giunta was
unwittingly accurate when he claimed to have implemented holes in the
volumes of Montage sur fond vert (1979) in
order to aerate the painting. This undoubtedly elicited
him to avoid the closed and hermetic surfaces of rigorous
formalism at home. And topping off the opening, the holes
pierced in these volumes introduced the idea of birdhouses
or camera lenses, in other words, the concept of passage
into life – whether attached to the creation of a
photo negative, the fledgling’s flight or the transformation
of material into work of art – through the orifice.
Giunta continued like this for another construction, Composition
no 2 (1978-1979), which unlike the previous, has the
more centralized, compact grouping we generally find in
this series, of which one of the first, Composition,
was conceived between 1970 and 1971.
With regard to this last point, the grouping of various
surfaces in the vast majority of constructions is distinguished
by formalism with a somewhat organic aspect that needs
to be emphasized. Clearly distinguished from the pure
formalism practised by the plasticians by using clear
borders, rectilinear designs and colours lain flat, Giunta’s
formalism could be called baroque. Through planar surfaces,
Giunta played instead with curve, tangent, irregularity,
asymmetry and gently textured colours, as the astonishing
works Et il y a de la musique (1978-1980), Composition
no1 (1978), Composition architecturale (1980)
and Bien assis (1981-1982) clearly illustrate.
In these constructions, colours generally coincide with
a surface delimited by a relief of collaged rope and thereby
respond to a principle inherited from Greenbergian formalism
which proposes that uniform colour correspond to the surface
it occupies. Thus, along with the alternation of planes,
the resulting chromatic contrasts contribute to the importance
of the rhythm that measures the organic constructions.
But it seems important to specify here that, according
to the artist’s disclosures, colour was very often
applied after the construction is realized. Commencing
with a few lines, Giunta would quickly abandon drawing
so as not to prejudice his imagination, and would set
up a series of volumes, rhythmed by the differences, if
not the oppositions, that by his own admission exhilarated
him.
Finally, rhythm can be considered from several angles.
It participates primarily in the planes’ asymmetry
(Et il y a de la musique, 1978-1980; Composition
no 1, 1978), in their symmetry (Bien assis, 1981-1982; Composition architecturale, 1980) or
their successive unevening (Montage no 1, 1979-1980).
The rhythm is then punctuated by the ordered repetition
of small miscellaneous elements – arrow signs, grids,
nails, pastilles, short sticks – visible in works
like Montage no 1 (1979-1980), Bien assis (1981-1982),
Composition façade (1983-1984) and Composition
architecturale (1980) and where, elsewhere, they echo
the corrugated cardboard found in certain backgrounds.
Inherent to the very process of construction, and governed
by the painter’s pleasure in opposing horizontal
and vertical, these few rhythmic factors afford the paintings
the visual stability and control necessary for solidity,
to the point of setting up a mise en abyme, namely that
of the construction within the construction. By analogy,
one might say these rhythms are just as essential to the
works of art as the rhythms of the seasons, days, fields
and prayers are for life.
With his constructions, Giunta intuitively understood
that rhythm is also, and above all, a fundamental element
of poetry. Constantly renewed, and unprecedented from
one work to the next, rhythm is articulated through changes
of levels and hollows in a baroque form which imprints
certain images in the viewer: computer circuit, musical
instrument, Japanese mask, decorative brooch, aerial view,
fantasy of secret corners...
Reflecting Giunta’s whole oeuvre, these baroque constructions
are purely a matter of poetry, constructed according to
the world order that material imposes.
Throughout these four periods, Giunta remained receptive
to the influences of lyric abstraction, automatism, art
brut and formalism, and he progrssively imposed material
as the essence of his art. Accompanying every work to
completion like a veritable monster to be fed, he set
as an imperative necessity of his art the achievement
of constructions that, under the guise of amalgams, allied
geometry and the organic. After painting images of the
world through figurative representations, making them
abstract with a view to self-referential work, he integrated
fragments of reality into his paintings to construct new
objects that in return, offer themselves to the world
without categorization, without denomination, in the silence
of their contiguities, invented before writing.
Hence, the plastic constructions of Joseph Giunta designate
their place in the history of postmodern art.
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