PROVENANCE
Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

In 1969, Guido Molinari briefly abandoned the use of vertical bands of colour and began a series of “checkerboard” paintings, further dividing the verticals by the horizontal and creating new, complex chromatic arrangements of grid-like modules. Until January 1970, these works were titled Structures, recalling the series of paintings produced from 1963 to 1964 that experimented with harmonious relationships between colours and patterns. Lasting only until March 1970, these checkered paintings recuperated the tectonic arrangements of those earlier works, highlighting the visual force that could be found in the complex arrangements.

In Structure vert violet, Molinari avoids the static weight of an orthogonal grid by establishing a fluid or discordant relationship between colours. The canvas is ordered not through a strict repetition of colours, but through a certain rhyming of their order: split pairs of green and violet exist in mirrored opposition to each other across a diagonal, while the peach structure oscillating down the centre of the arrangement is echoed by the reverberations of blue modules at the boundaries of the field. The monumentality of the work is then continuously animated by the perceptual shifts demanded by its relational geometries.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars