When emotions run high, they take on a red colour. Reddening of the face communicates passion, nervousness, the swell of feeling, the pounding of the heart. Red conveys emotional intensity even when abstracted. Artists often combine it with form and surface to express charged emotional states.

Alfred Pellan
Young Girl in Blue Dress, 1941
© Estate of Alfred Pellan / SODRAC

The back of the chair, painted red in Young Girl in Blue Dress, plays a central role in the reading of the subject, a portrait of a spirited little girl. Her barrettes and the line of her pursed mouth are red and tiny dabs of bright red at the corners of her eyes. Is she rage or defiance?
In its use of red, this work is a good example of the descriptive qualities of colour. Angular planes and bold outlined shapes, with a palette dominated by blue and red, enhance the power of the girl's stern expression and the stiffness of her pose. The mottled blue background and the solid red band of the girl's chair foreshadow Pellan's later move into abstraction, which relies on colour and shape rather than figuration to create meaning.

Rita Letendre
Tension on Black, 1963

A central black hard-edged shape dominates this work. Its jagged edges are a gesture of the artist, surrounded by oranges and reds, sometimes mixed with black.
Letendre was one of the Automatistes, a Quebec group based in Montreal who were passionate about their formal and social concerns, and expressed them through abstraction, starting in the late 1940s. Robert Ayre, a Montreal modernist art critic, wrote: "Her work has always suggested to me geological travail: the earthquake, the riven rock, the eruption of the internal fire, the scarlet torrent of molten lava, the motionless blue water."
The title suggests a metaphor of tension. Colour and line fracture shapes in this work, showing the forces in conflict. Active and hot colours, the reds and oranges, contrast with black, a preference she attributes to her Iroquois-Abenaki native heritage.

Carl Beam
The North American Iceberg, 1985

Carl Beam creates a cultural landscape dominated by shades of red. The combination of imagery and colour suggest a bloody past for the continent.
Images have been photo-silkscreened onto a large plexiglass support where individual stories are collected and then collaged to form new narratives about colonization. Aboriginal people in traditional dress are depicted in the process of assimilation. Continuing the theme of conquest, Beam borrows newspaper images of the assassination of Anwar Sadat and of a rocket launching. Multiple self-portraits link his identity to the events he has assembled.
The title, The North American Iceberg, is a reference to the 1985 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario entitled The European Iceberg. That exhibition was a curatorial response to a perceived lack of representation on the world stage of Italian and German contemporary art and design. It's likely that Beam altered and politicized the title to point to First Nations history, which has been written from a Eurocentric perspective.

Claude Tousignant
Paranoid, 1956
© Claude Tousignant

The colours in Claude Tousignant's Paranoid pose a riddle. What does a block of flat and shiny red car enamel coupled with an equal proportion of bright yellow have to do with the title, Paranoid? The definition of "paranoia" is a dislocated sense of reality. How does this vibrant combination of colours express this psychological state? The scale of the painting and the garish combination of cadmium red and yellow create a feeling of paranoia.
Tousignant was working within a modernist tradition, where the goal was the pure application of paint without any reference to objects. He wants the viewer to consider the relationship between abstraction and experience, and perhaps experience the sensation of paranoia as a result.

Mary Pratt
Red Current Jelly, 1972
© Mary Pratt

Red heightens awareness of the otherwise mundane scene of jelly left to set. Mary Pratt captures such scenes with her camera, later developing them into paintings. Sharpness of light and the predominance of red intersect in a moment of time to elevate the scale of this domestic event. The artist celebrates ordinary things: the shine of tinfoil, reflection on glass, the fluidity of red liquid. In this small painting, domestic subjects suggest symbolic concerns.
Pratt participates in the iconographical traditions of art history, specifically those of the Renaissance and the still life, in which ordinary objects are metaphors of life and death. The red substance plays with allusions to wine and blood. The substance in the bowl, which appears at first glance to be setting jelly, could be interpreted as fleshy material. The red dishes, precariously filled to the brim with fresh preserves, could spill at any moment. In Red Current Jelly, Pratt addresses the fragility of life.