Les Automatistes

A closer look

In the archive studies, varied paint masses, overlapping gestures and unequal intervals create movement without a fixed depicted subject.

A group and a wider cultural project

Quebec’s cultural heritage register describes the Automatistes forming around Paul-Émile Borduas in Montreal during the 1940s. The 1948 collective publication Refus global challenged established cultural authority. Its signatories worked across disciplines; reducing the group to a recipe for splattered paint misses that wider setting.

The heritage account links their experiments to Surrealism and the search for expression beyond academic rules. Spontaneity is an approach to making, not a guarantee that every random mark produces an effective picture. Nor does one repeated brush effect describe every artist associated with the group.

Read the relationships between marks

In an abstract study, ask where the painting accelerates and where it pauses. A dense dark patch can hold a field of lighter gestures together; an unpainted interval can be as active as a brushstroke. Compare the direction, size and opacity of neighboring marks rather than searching immediately for a hidden object.

Try an initial passage without a planned subject, then look at what has actually appeared. Add a contrasting scale of mark or remove a competing area. This contemporary exercise borrows a question about openness and control; it does not reproduce a historical Automatist method in every detail. The archive images use red, yellow, blue and deep green to explore that tension. They should not be attributed to Borduas, Riopelle or another named artist without documentary evidence.