Fernand Leduc was a part of the great movements of abstract art in twentieth-century Québec, passing from an expressively gestural art to an almost mystic quest around colour with a stop for geometric rigour along the way. A gallery devoted to this great painter of light.
Fernand Leduc once said: “As an artist, I see myself as working in an Impressionist tradition of ‘painters of light.’” From the early gestural Automatism to the monochrome canvases of recent years, this quest for light through colour has always been at the root of Leduc’s work. It is a quest born of “inner necessity,” as he likes to call it.
Leduc’s non-representational painting nevertheless reveals a landscape where a battle with the artistic material has taken place. It then conveys the light of a land or becomes a set of coloured signs that stand out against a transparent background. The shapes then form coloured masses and become geometrical. Finally, colour becomes the sole true path “towards the islands of light.” These “micro-chromes” are achieved by superimposing numerous thin layers of paint which explore this form of colour-light.