Background
Claude Tousignant was born on December 23, 1932, in Montreal, into the family of Alberic Tousignant and Gilberte Hardy-Lacasse.
Claude Tousignant was born on December 23, 1932, in Montreal, into the family of Alberic Tousignant and Gilberte Hardy-Lacasse.
Right from his early childhood, Claude knew he wanted to be an artist. His parents supported him by sending him to the prestigious School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts , which he attended from 1948 to 1952. He then travelled to Paris where he studied at the Académie Ranson, returning to Montreal in the spring of 1952.
After graduating from the MMFA, Claude quickly became a member of both the Plasticiens art group, which focused on avant-garde styles of expressionist painting, and the Montreal association of non-figurative artists. He drew inspiration from his Quebec contemporary, Guido Molinari, another highly influential abstract painter of the era; together, they collaborated on many exhibitions and projects, their most recently acclaimed being "the red show" in 2002.
Tousignant has always taken an enthusiastic, unique and modern position towards his art. He was one of the first Canadian painters to study the combinations of hard-edged shapes with varying colors and interrelations. During the creation of his earlier works in the 1950's and early 60's, Tousignant was concerned with and influenced by the American post-war challenge of creating art through paint alone. He wanted his paintings to be perceived as objects, as autonomous commodities, with no inner meanings or references to anything else.
In his early works , Tousignant was accustomed to painting squares and solid masses of color to form an overall composition; by 1965, he had shifted to circular, pulsating "bullseyes" and other circular color field works. The convergence of his concerns for color and shape led to a significant period in 1978 devoted to monochromatic works called "object paintings": these were genre defying pieces at once sculptures, paintings and installations. With their vibrating, naturally rythmic forms and their sharp, clean edges, these paintings challenged the senses and distorted ordinary perceptive patterns. He wanted the viewer to break away from every day sensory perception, to speak to them optically through his use of color and pattern.
As the colors in his paintings change, the visual perception of the onlooker is affected by the "vibrating" illusion of the artwork, and this optical challenge creates the illusion of movement within the painting. For the amateur and experienced critics alike, these artworks are nothing less than a visual delight. Tousignant's art cannot be defined or placed in any one specific category; he is at once a minimalist, an expressionist, an op-artist, a color field painter and an abstractionist. His works consist of many different colors and shapes, all of which he arranges in an intricate and delicate sequence to form an overall effect of "pure color experience."
Because his art is focused primarily in color, Claude spends hours on end adding and augmenting the colors to be used on his canvas, and his 100% original pigments are virtually non-existent on the market. His works have two distinct characteristics; their large size and unpredictable, vibrant colors. His works are nearly always large scale, with either a combination of squares and other tetrahedral shapes as their main focus, or large "bullseye" like circular paintings; both always vary in color. He almost invariably uses paint as his medium, and canvases of varying sizes and shapes, depending on the degree of drama he wishes to add to his artwork, or any other hard surface he so desires to paint upon.
When painting these large colorful works, Tousignant takes great care not to show any evidence of brushstrokes, variations in texture, or any other form of surface disturbance to his seamless works. His attention to detail is highly evident in the sharp edged, flawless look of his work. Claude Tousignant is still alive and painting today. He is a greatly talented and influential artist, not only for the Canadian artist of the new era, but for many people, artists, and aspiring artists around the globe. His work is exciting, unique, and defies the laws of typical sensory perception. As long as color and optics are an integral part of every day life, Tousignant's work will remain a landmark for color field painters and op-artists everywhere.
From his earliest works his intention was to make purely abstract paintings in which nothing interfered with the viewer's sensation of colour. He chose a circular format in which sequences of colour produce a dynamic optical effect. During the early 1980s, without abandoning abstraction, he began making paintings composed of a single colour, built to stand away from the wall on which they are hung.
Quotations: "What I wish to do is make painting objective, to bring it back to its source - where only painting remains, emptied of all extraneous matter - to the point at which painting is pure sensation."
He is considered a member of the second generation of the modern art movement in Montreal called "les Plasticiens." Tousignant is a member of the Montreal Association of Non-Figurative Artists.
In 1968 Claude married Judith Terry.