The Park

The year 1958 marks in Jean-Paul Lemieux's career his participation as a painter chosen by Canada for the Universal Exhibition in Brussels. He then participated in numerous exhibitions in Paris, Mexico City and Pittsburg.
    
Jean-Paul Lemieux will be the artist who has been most faithful to the naturalist motif in Quebec art despite strong pressure from defenders of pure and formal abstraction since the 1940s. This does not prevent Jean-Paul Lemieux to create and offer modern works and to be fully involved in this artistic movement in the 1950s. During the retrospective exhibition organized by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Québec, Marie Carani categorizes the creation of the artist dating from 1956 to 1970 as the stage of maturity, that of works moving from figurative to symbolic. According to Marie Carani, "Lemieux says grandiose things with a simple, simplified expression, like abstract painters. Hence the astonishing spiritual significance of these works which obsess and hypnotize the gaze"

This simplification is found in the work Le Parc which brings us to contemplate the work laterally, by its size, but also by its composition which brings our eye from left to right. This horizon seen in diving evokes us a distant reverie and a tranquility as if time stopped, emotions often present in the works of the artist from the mid-1950s.

1. CARANI, Marie, L'effet Lemieux-, Québec, Musée du Québec. Les Publications du Québec, 1992, p. 238

2. DELGRAVE, Marie (1993). Jean Paul Lemieux : peintre de la dissidence, Vie des Arts  38 (151), 24-29

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