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Bercement silencieux is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Description
Bercement silencieux (Silent Rocking) (1956) is an oil painting by the Canadian abstract painter Paul-Émile Borduas. This painting comes out of Borduas’s “Parisian years.” The painting’s size and Borduas’s characteristic high-relief application of paint make Bercement silencieux a very physical and present piece. It demands visual participation from the viewer and its asymmetry forces the eye to move unguided from square to square, awakening new interpretations and impressions. Borduas’s sparse use of colour casts into greater evidence the three-dimensional lights and shadows that are created by the thick application of paint with a palette-knife. The white has been applied in tangible ridges and folds, like a sheet, that has been cut and pulled aside to reveal a black fabric beneath. The blacks do not recede as deeply as in his other works, instead they sit within the same density of space, making room for themselves amongst the whites. The browns are equally as important sometimes taking on the appearance of worn leather and sometimes a softer material, “crumpling” like the blacks beside it.

Historical information
Before Paris, having studied with the Abstract Expressionists in New York, Borduas was producing works inspired by action painting, specifically Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings. Borduas expressed particular interest in the way Pollock commanded a slight sense of direction over the application of paint, but at the same time, with his free gestures at arm’s length, instead of tight and restrained, allowing the medium itself to make provocative “accidental” statements. Though Borduas’s method is more controlled than Pollock’s it is not geometrically composed. In his own way, with his broad palette-knife that was more like a spatula, and his quick, aggressive gestures, he created a similar dialogue between artist and medium – between spirit or passion and matter.

Paris disappointed Borduas in comparison with the artistic advances he had been delighted by in New York. However, Borduas did not let this dampen his artistic awakening and he used the time abroad to experiment and evolve his style and personal expression. Most pronounced is Borduas’s thick impasto, something that had already become an important part of his works as can be seen with Abstract Composition (1955). Further developing this technique Borduas pairs his three-dimensional build up of paint with a strong contrast between white and dark space, effectively creating black holes in the canvas that recede into unknown depths. This is extremely evident in Le Chant des libellules (1956) where you feel you are almost falling into the black spaces, and the colours are hovering, just in front of this empty space. Consistent throughout is Borduas’s efforts to express life in materiality, material’s omnipresence, and our ability to be spiritually connected with it.