b'Jean McEwen: La folie conduisant lAmour no.1 Its a square-shouldered magisterial painting. It dates to the second half of the 1960s when McEwen for a few years abandoned his otherwise life-long commitment to oil for acrylic paint. In the process he momentarily forsook thick paint and internal luminosity to instead exploit upfront flatness. At the same time his edges turned crisp and masking-tape delineated.Acrylic had since the late 1950s become popular with abstract painters whether in New York or in Montreal. Close to home, at 3 St. Paul St. East in Old Montreal where McEwen had his studio on the third floor, Yves Gaucher, installed two floors below him, when turning from printmaking to painting had exclusively adopted acrylic. And on the floor between them, Charles Gagnon, if still using oil, was using masking-taped lines to draw and flatten his rectilinear constructions.La folie conduisant lAmour no.1, with its narrow orange framing bands and its broad, central opaquely black shaft, is bracingly frontal. There is painterly gesture, of course. The two side panels are marked with dabs and smears of variegated colours, predominantly a fresh and exhilarating lemony yellow. But in kinship with the black centre their surfaces are thinned and flattened and squeezed into our immediate world. The painting therefore declares itself more quickly than past work. Its symmetry is explicit as if the composition were a grand holistic emblematic banner.As to its title, Love led by Folly, No. 1: word has it that it may refer to a (crazy) extramarital affair that he was having during those years.Roald Nasgaard March 2023Roald Nasgaard (b. 1941) is an award-winning author and curator and professor emeritus at the Florida State University. He has written extensively on Canadian abstraction, including books such The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940 (1984) and renowned Abstract Painting in Canada (2008). He is a member of the Order of Canada.'