| "I realize what is essential in my painting is always poetry which has been my first means of expression all through my work. A painting with age does not have the same interest than in the past. Revolutions are brief and shock of the new fades just as fast. What is remaining then? A beauty that elevates us beyond our being. The man changes and so does his painting but what remains present is the emotion, which for me is called "Art". The enchantment must inspire and be renewed according to time. As time fades our desire for a lasting beauty becomes greater. And if Baudelaire urged us to find something new in the depths of the unknown, time still brings us back to the beauty of pure mirrors which makes everything look more beautiful." (from the catalogue McEwen’s career was remarkable. In 1956, the artist presented his important, white monochromatic paintings at the non-figurative gallery, L’Actuelle, in Montreal. In 1963, he showed his work at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, and in Fifteen Canadian Artists, a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In that same year he executed a large five panel mural for the Toronto International Airport, and sent six paintings to the Biennial in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 1987, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presented the major survey exhibition Jean McEwen: Colour In Depth. In 1952, on the advice of Paul-Emile Borduas, McEwen visited the Canadian painter, Jean-Paul Riopelle, in Paris. Riopelle introduced him to Sam Francis, the American abstract painter who had studied with Mark Rothko in California. The gestural, high colour, abstract expressionism of Francis stirred McEwen, who broke free from cubist abstract figure and ground that referred to nature. Borduas and his young followers, Les Automatistes, and later, Molinari and the Neo-Plasticiensat, L’Actuelle, and the international artists in Europe exerted a decisive influence on McEwen’s work. Jean McEwen passed away in 1999 but remains a solitary figure in Canadian art. (Excerpted from a foreword
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