Constructions chimériques 1967

Jean-Paul Riopelle made this print, Constructions chimériques, and you can almost see him working on it, can't you? The marks have this frantic energy, these clusters of black like swarms of insects, all set against a ground of delicate golden scratches. The texture here is everything. It’s all about this physical accumulation of ink, this dense layering, and how that contrasts with the bare paper. Zoom in and you can see how some of the lines are fat and juicy, while others are so fine they almost disappear. There is one spot near the top left where a mass of tangled marks almost forms a face, a little monstrous head. Riopelle was part of the Automatistes, a group interested in Surrealism, so maybe these chimères, or chimeras, were supposed to be born directly from the subconscious. This reminds me a little of Cy Twombly’s work, that same sense of restless mark-making. But in the end, it’s a dance between intention and accident, a space for our imaginations to fill in the gaps.