Preparatory artwork, for Cycle cretois, #10, at Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. 

Gosselin, C. (1985). Le Clycle crétois by Françoise Sullivan. Vie des arts, 29(118), 34–35.

In order to describe the work of Francoise Sullivan, Cycle crétois 2, The Cosner gallery transcribes the words of Claude Gosselin in his article Le cycle Crétois de Françoise Sullivan published in Vie des arts in 1985. Here is the link to the complete article in Érudit : https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/va/1985-v29-n118-va1161932/54162ac.pdf . Please note this is a free translation from French to English. We invite reader to consult the original text. 

"The Cretan Cycle […] was produced, during the year 1983-1984, on the island of Crete, hence its name. It is presented in a series of irregular circular tableaux - a series of tondos begun in 1980 - in which an anthropomorphic figure stands and dances amid patches of color of varying density which impose the idea of ??a mountainous and barren landscape.

The Cretan Cycle abandons this attachment to the tangible physical world to focus on a visual interpretation of metaphysical concerns. Subtracting her subject from a definite reality, she places it in an allegorical representation. The ancestral myth takes shape in the natural chaos. The stupid man mixes with imprecise nature: mountains, valleys, streams stick together, defining the world, the earth, organic life. The man-beast, the shaman, the unifying communicator between the present, the past and the beyond, occupies the central space of this mythical representation.

To describe this old original myth, Françoise Sullivan butts and glues painted pieces of canvas to each other, cut into irregular shapes borrowing from the silhouettes of mountains, the hollows of geographical depressions, the sinuosities of rivers. The planes mingle, the perspective becomes more a construction of the mind than a precise observation of the painting. The shaman, shown in profile, most often in light colours, touches on the different planes, without ever dismounting. The painting is thus constructed, assembled, painted, like the successive layers and juxtaposed impressions that shape the history of the human spirit" -Claude Gosselin, The Cretan Cycle of Françoise Sullivan in Vie des arts, 1985.