Collection of the artist
Collection of Guy Molinari
Sotheby’s, New York, New York
Private Collection, Toronto
Exhibited
“Guido Molinari”, Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France, October 17, 1998 - January 3, 1999, no. 21
“Molinari et la couleur”, Galerie Simon Blais, Montreal, December 10, 2008 - January 24, 2009
“Canadian Abstraction: A Selling Exhibition”, Sotheby’s, New York, February 14 - March 9, 2014, no. 18
Literature
Musée de Grenoble, “Guido Molinari”, exhibition catalogue, Grenoble, France, 1998, reproduced page 31 (No. 21)
Sotheby’s, “Canadian Abstraction: A Selling Exhibition”, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2014, listed pages 64 and 107, reproduced page 65, reproduced (detail) pages 62 & 63
The painting is a stunner. That was my immediate reaction when I first saw it in real life at Sotheby’s “Canadian Abstraction” exhibition in New York in 2014. Not that Molinari didn’t produce a host of extraordinary paintings in the 1960s, especially among the Stripe Paintings, his signature work of the decade. But “Série noir/blanc” exudes a particular brash exuberance caused not the least by its unusually reduced palette - black and white and the two primary colours red and blue - delivered in an across-the-surface march of identically-wide vertical bands. Its palette was also one I remembered from Molinari’s seminal “Homage à Jauran” from 1961, which I had grown up with, so to speak, during my regular visits to the Vancouver Art Gallery in the mid-1960s.
“Homage à Jauran” was Stripe Painting in its infancy, from the time when Molinari was just learning to eliminate horizontals from his pictorial layouts so as no longer to compose by balancing off part against part. Having mastered the legacy of Mondrian’s Neoplasticism, it was time to tip his hat to the colour planes and “zips” of Barnett Newman. “Homage à Jauran” stripes may not yet all be the same width, as they will become in “Série noir/blanc”, but nor do they read as discrete shapes, like rectangles. They could in theory run both upwards and downwards indefinitely if the frame had not cut off their potential for vertical extension. Molinari’s gain from so radically expelling formal relationships from his paintings was to forefront colour: to unmask how colours behave, to reveal how colours unfold as the eye scans their course across the surface of the canvas, and to exploit how their appearances change contingent on their adjacencies and their placement within the larger sequences of the procession of the stripes. Whereas Molinari’s contemporary American and Canadian colour field painters at the same time, like Jack Bush, tended to declare their colours individually on the model of Matisse, Molinari and his fellow Montreal Plasticiens chose to exploit colour’s capacity for mutation.
“Série noir/blanc” employs Molinari’s fundamental method of serially organizing his stripes: constructing his compositions by systematically repeating the same sequence of two, three, four or more colour bands. Often he does this strictly. But rules can also be broken, and “Série noir/ blanc” is only partially serial. The first six-band sequence of the eighteen bands of the painting is repeated once, but then he scrambles the third set, its sequence performing colour flips and inversions, fazing our left to right scanning and jumbling our expectations, maybe to turn us back to start over again. It’s like stating a theme, repeating it, and afterwards performing a free variation.
But that’s too intellectual a parsing out and not really what experience delivers. As we look, we discover other structural orders like the pacing of two black-white-black triads countered by a red-white-red one. Or we can otherwise assemble the stripes by fours or fives, or leap from one same-coloured band to another, and so on. But regardless of how we analyze the structural logics, the bands group and regroup and patterns dissolve and resolve and redissolve under the dynamics of actual perception. Like all the Stripe paintings, “Série noir/blanc” resists being a fixed composition, but insists on performing as an ongoing dynamic participatory event, whose realm lies somewhere between us and the canvas. We could say “Série noir/blanc” is less a painting than it is a real object entered into the world for our consideration. Or, that less than being a fixed object, it is an unstable energy field in a constant processes of comings and goings. Our relation to it – even as in concentrates and intensifies our engagement - is as real and time- immersed as other quotidian experiences in the world.
And that is what is most striking about “Série noir/blanc” – and what sets it apart - is precisely its worldly confidence. This has to do with its reduced palette: the purity of its blacks and whites and its clear reds and blues. These are flag colours like the French “tricolore” (with no symbolism intended), aglow, luminous and upfront. For once Molinari subverts his usual practice and abandons his more common interplay of secondary hues: accentuating staccato dance rhythms over legato colour mutations, all unfurled in the crisp light of day.
“Série noir/blanc” exemplifies how Molinari’s Stripe Paintings – and with them the Plasticien movement as a whole - constitute a major contribution to post-Abstract Expressionism and post-Automatisme, nationally and internationally.
We extend our thanks to Roald Nasgaard for contributing the preceding essay. Roald is the author of the critically acclaimed “Abstract Painting in Canada”. His exhibitions and accompanying books dedicated to Canadian abstraction include “Yves Gaucher: A Fifteen-Year Perspective 1963-1978”, “The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941–1960” and “The Plasticiens and Beyond: Montreal 1955–1970”.
