The relation to matter and the very personal treatment of the tool, while important in Riopelle’s work, seem to particularly determine the production of the period 1960-1965. Taking again the formula applied to Monet: “the eye, the hand”, one can say then about Riopelle: “the matter, the hand”. When he tries to break the mold of habits that become systematic formulas, we seek, at the beginning of the 1960s, milestones, benchmarks indicating the continuity underlying the desperate effort of renewal.
If painting, gouache, ink and watercolor, the print itself are a graphic and pictorial continuity of the gesture of the hand, there is in the passage to sculpture, as to the material and the manipulation, a solution of continuity that does not stop to question the analyst of the period.
MONIQUE BRUNET-WEINMANN