Between the years 1963 and 1969, Guido Molinari was focusing almost exclusively on his “striped” paintings, canvases featuring strict geometries of equal, vertical bands that emphasized the force and materiality of colour. The artist titled these works “mutations,” “rhythms” and “series” of colours, relationships that result in structure and movement emerging from the fluid—or disintegrated—borders between object and space. The works produced during this period defined the motifs that would define the rest of Molinari’s career and remain his most celebrated works.

This powerful canvas was produced in 1966, at a formative time for the young artist. The year previous, Molinari was included in the influential exhibition The Responsive Eye, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. That MoMA show, which included fellow post-Plasticiens Claude Tousignant and Yves Gaucher, was a major exploration of the optical effects of hard-edge painting. In many ways it introduced a younger generation of Québécois painters to the world and jumpstarted the international acclaim that would follow Molinari in the latter half of the decade. His receipt of the John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in 1966 allowed him to double the size of his studio and subsequently enabled his canvases to expand to the massive scale on display here.

Structure rythmique vert-bleu encompasses a stripped-back palette of only four colours, rendered in primary and saturated, flattened hues: green, blue, yellow and red, with the first two lending the work its title. But if there is simplicity in the colour scheme, it is only in service of complicating the structure of the canvas itself. The initial understanding of the vertical bands suggests that the lines are a predictable pattern of four colours. However, as our eye traverses the canvas, we find that the regularity quickly breaks down, and the work’s own rhythms emerge.

Rather than equal quantities, there is an imbalance in the bandings: six strips of blue, five each of green and red, and only four of yellow. There is no repetition of forms, only colours positioned in relation to their immediate neighbours and animated by a certain harmony that arises between tones. The overall composition remains legible, however, never devolving into noise but rather inviting a closer look. Further reading reveals that there is in fact a certain irregular order between the bands, with split pairings and mirrored intervals appearing across the canvas. The left-most grouping of red-green-blue is immediately repeated for a second time and is also reflected by a blue-green-red group on the right of the canvas. Three blue-yellow-red tricolours repeat, but the first two of these are preceded by a band of green.

The work is then structured by its own internal logic, one that implicates the viewer in its velocity: as the eye moves across the canvas, thrown alternately forward and backward, it discovers new combinations and rhythms. As we are confronted with a constantly shifting sense of relationships between the bands the picture becomes animated, spurring an illusory sense of space to contain this rapid energy. A new relationship between figure and ground then arises, an expansive chromatic space that is activated by the observer’s optic exchange.

This monumental work comes at Molinari’s most pivotal and confident period and is an important work in the Plamondon Collection. In the year 1967, the Art Gallery of Ontario acquired his major canvas Mutation serielle verte-rouge, produced the same year as this lot and featuring the same colour scheme (though with additional modulations of red and green). Molinari would go on to represent Canada in the 1968 Venice Biennale and that same year was included in the Seventh Biennial of Canadian Painting.

For the biography on Luc Plamondon in PDF format (in French and English), please click here.