Rita Letendre began painting in the early 1950s in Montreal. She briefly attended the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in 1948 and 1949, where she became close friends with Ulysse Comtois (1931-1999). They both left their studies to join the new movement of Les Automatistes led by Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960). Her work was included in their group shows; significantly, she was one of the few women and the only artist with an Indigenous heritage to participate in this revolutionary art movement. Later she was associated with Les Plasticiens taking from them her interest in the formal elements of painting. Eventually, she joined the Non-Figurative Artists Association of Montreal in 1956.
R. Letendre’s early work is characterised by her vigorous commitment to abstract vocabulary and a ceaseless search for expression through colour and gesture of the spirit of life. Her Abenaki grandmother instilled in her a deep connection to the life force of the universe, the interconnectedness of everything. However, her childhood was also marked by violence and racism, and she spoke about the “explosions of colour [as her] rebellion in the face of sadness, death and anguish.” [Hedwidge, Asselin , Rita Letendre: Les Éléments/The Elements]

Travelling and living in Europe led to R. Letendre to find her own luminous, personal and energetic painting style. She admired the work of the American Abstract Expressionists as much as that of Italian Renaissance painters, as well as the dynamism of her Parisian contemporaries. Seeking to harness in her powerful gestures an intense spiritual force, R. Letendre worked with various materials over her long career, including oils, pastels and acrylics, using her hands, a palette knife, brushes and the airbrush. Renowned for her bold and visceral style, she pushed the boundaries of colour, light and space to new heights. Her works are monumental in size because she liked to create a sense of being enveloped.
In the early 1960s she exhibited frequently with prominent dealers in France and Italy, and won major prizes for her paintings. She moved to Los Angeles with her new partner, Israeli sculptor Kosso Eloul (1920-1995) in 1964. R. Letendre was immediately commissioned to create a large, 7.5- by 6-metre mural, Sun Forces (1965), at the California State University Long Beach. For this work she pioneered the use of epoxy paint, realising that a heavy impasto would not work due to scale and site, having to take into consideration the strong sun, wind and ocean air. While colour continued to play an important role in her compositions, the impact of figuration was no longer delivered in her impasto gestural work but rather through line. In Sun Forces, the black hard-edge forms collide, creating sparks of rich yellows and green, anticipating her dynamic composition of wedges and vectors to follow.

After living in the United States, she and K. Eloul settled in Toronto in 1969. Her art and life became intertwined with the city’s development. R. Letendre’s bold vectors of colour, wedges colliding into flashes of light, energised the streets and interior public spaces with a glorious optimism and confidence. It was in Toronto that she produced some of her most iconic paintings and public art commissions, such as Lodestar (1970) and Irowakan (1976). During the 1970s and early 1980s she continued to create beyond the museum’s walls. Her public murals were always conceived in the full context of a civic site, taking into account how they would function, integrate or go against the space, to connect and galvanise a it. It is a profound loss to Toronto that these singular public gestures have since been removed or covered up. In 2014 she was able to revisit her monumental skylight Joy (1977) conceived to suffuse an above-ground subway station in coloured light with blues, orange browns, greens and yellows; she oversaw its installation in 2020.
Each new phase of R. Letendre’s work was driven by formal experimentations. While formal questions always drove her from one innovation to another, she did not conform to a strict linear progression. Style and innovations overlap, disappear and reappear, as well as combine. With this in mind, we can sketch rough timeframes of cinterest. From the 1950s to the mid-1960s her paintings are characterised by an interest in mass and space. Working in oil, she would paint two masses often in conflict or in transformative relation. Using thick impastos of colour and black, masses move through black space or black masses move through colour. This phase led her to experiment with movement from the mid-1960s until the late 1980s. By 1971 her hard-edged paintings of arrows created with an airbrush had become her signature style both on canvas and in public sites. Her use of the airbrush went from strict lines in tight configurations of multiple colours producing vibrations and movement to a more diffuse line. By 1987 her use of this line allowed for an in-depth examination of light. Daybreak (1987) is a mature colour-field abstraction produced through hazy horizontal lines in ultramarine, cobalt deep blue, cadmium orange and deep cadmium red.  The contrast of cool blues and radiant reds and oranges allow a sunrise to become a meditation on the whole idea of a tomorrow. After the death of her husband in 1995, she returned to oil and her original gestural style. In thick paint and colours in constant motion, R. Letendre attended to the role of emotion in abstraction. Throughout her formal experiments, she maintained an interest in understanding the cosmos, life and self-discovery.

R. Letendre had several major solo exhibitions, the first in Palm Springs Desert Museum, California in 1974, a travelling retrospective organized by Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec in 2003, and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2017. By creating the world anew through her paintings and commissions, her work embodies her ongoing quest for connection and understanding.