Born in Granby, Charles Daudelin took Paul-Émile Borduas’s advice to move to Montréal, where he took courses at the École du meuble from 1939 to 1943. Elected a member of the Contemporary Arts Society in 1941, he lived in New York and then in Paris, where he attended Fernand Léger’s studio. Teaching at the École des beaux arts de Montréal, Daudelin created the “integrated art” section there in 1963. Among his most prestigious accomplishments in integration art are the altarpiece in the Sacred Heart chapel at the Notre-Dame basilica and the sculpture-fountain Embâcle at Place du Québec in Paris.
Artwork description
This bronze sculpture by Charles Daudelin was produced at a defining moment in his career. Until the 1960s, Daudelin was known for his figurative works on paper, oil paintings, ceramics, and more artisanal projects such as puppets and figurative paintings. In the early 1960s, his visual vocabulary, more singular and assertive after decades of experimentation, became entirely abstract and idiosyncratic. Composition n° 1 stems from this period, when Daudelin developed an interest in responding to the urban environment and its architecture, which would form one of the cornerstones of his practice.
This textured bronze, along with other small bronzes from the same period, allowed Daudelin to experiment with new materials and techniques on a more intimate scale before transforming the same ideas into monumental public art works integrated in architectural sites, such as the Salle Maisonneuve at Place des Arts in 1967, and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 1969.
Composition n° 1 was first carved out of a block of polystyrene with a saw and a soldering iron before being cast in bronze through the lost wax technique. This vertical piece attests to Daudelin’s interest in the play between shadow and light while allowing the negative space to complete the work.