Painted in 1949, shortly after Jean-Paul Riopelle’s arrival in Paris in 1948, ‘Composition’ is one of the few pieces that mark a transition between his loose brushwork abstractions of the 1940s, often aligned with Abstract Expressionism, and the mosaic style for which he would become globally recognised. By 1949, Riopelle was abandoning the brush in favour of the palette knife, using it to sculpt and construct dense surfaces of interlocking colour which are widely admired for their sculptural quality. ‘Composition’, at the cusp of this moment, is remarkable for how freely paint moves across the surface, more instinctive and unrestrained at this point in his practice. Through the dense impasto, saturated colours accumulate in distinct layers. With paint built up pigment by pigment rather than pre-mixed, the full intensity of individual hues is preserved.