"Music and poetry had more influence on me than painting. Especially the music of Webern. I wanted to do in engraving what he had done in music: elaborate a visual rhythm with counter rhythms created by the striking effect of colour." - Yves Gaucher

This is a fine example of Yves Gaucher’s early painting, completed just before the launch of his celebrated Grey on Grey series. Gaucher began his career as a prize-winning printmaker before establishing himself as a key figure in Montreal’s Plasticien movement. Deeply influenced by modernist painting and the music of Anton Webern, Gaucher abandoned figuration to explore visual rhythm and perception through abstraction. In this 1967 canvas, Étude de Fusion Interne / mauve-gris-bleu, the artist arranges a sequence of horizontal lines across a bright, near-fluorescent field, encouraging a meditative engagement with space and time. As with his later Grey on Grey works, this painting invites close attention and slow looking, hallmarks of Gaucher’s precise, cerebral style.