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Notes:
Provenance:
With Fischer Fine Art Limited, London.
With Marlborough-Godard, Toronto and Montreal.
Private collection, Montreal

Exhibited:
Alex Colville, A Retrospective 1983-1984, Travelling Exhibition;
Art Gallery of Ontario:
Staatliche Kunsthalle - Berlin:
Museum Ludwig - Cologne:
The Montreal Museum of Fine Art:
Dalhousie University Art Gallery - Halifax:
Vancouver Art Gallery:
Catalogue No. 48

Note:
While Alex Colville would maintain that his paintings are “fundamentally optimistic”, David Burnett cautions us that we “must reconcile Colville’s statement…with the feelings of discomfort or of suspended threat that many of his paintings have.” It is impossible to deny the sense of menace that In the Woods inevitably evokes for the viewer. Burnett proposes that the subject matter can be viewed as something quite “straightforward” and that the mask worn by the man may simply be “a precaution against the weather”. Perhaps the man is a member of a local gun club and is enjoying a session of target practice. Burnett also notes that Colville has had a long interest in firearms and had joined a local gun club just for target practice in 1974, two years before this work was painted. However, it is unsurprising to learn that In The Woods was directly inspired by what the artist described as a “hair-raising scene” of a shooting in the woods at the end of the 1970 Bernardo Bertolucci film The Conformist, based on the 1951 novel by Alberto Moravia. Colville had both seen the movie and read the Moravia novel. Burnett writes: “The painting reflects a latent violence, a faceless violence suspended over the action. The hammer of the pistol is cocked and the man holds the option of choice; he can continue to suspend the action or precipitate it by compressing the trigger…In the Woods describes the raw aspect of threat, holding the potential for destruction whose aim and timing we cannot predict.” It is his ability to create here a sharply suspended moment, replete with ambiguity yet exciting in us an anticipation of what may come to pass, that makes Colville’s painting so compelling.

Literature:

David Burnett, Colville, McClelland And Stewart Ltd., Toronto, 1983, page 205, page 229 reproduced in colour, and page 250 (catalogue raisonne compiled by M. Schiff) listed as no. 109.


See Sothebys in Association with Ritchies sale, Toronto May 26 2008 lot 38 for a Study for In the Woods, dated 3,5,7 May 76