Sold for: $29,250

PROVENANCE
Ladies' Committee Sale of Contemporary Canadian Art, Montreal
A Prominent Montreal Family Estate

LITERATURE
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2007, page 188

In the 1960s, Guido Molinari executed a series of works known as Stripe Paintings using vertical bands of equal width and differing colour in repeating, fixed patterns. It was the reign of hard-edge painting, and Molinari took maximum advantage of the hardest of edges, placing near-total reliance on colour to energize these works. There is much variation in the width of the vertical bands in the individual Stripe Paintings; in Parallèles bleues they are quite wide, while some works have their verticality broken by shorter, horizontal blocks, or are offset by uneven widths, and are even diagonals. It was, however, a depiction of the innate energy of each colour that he sought. He wanted to paint the colour-interaction, with the character of each interaction determined by the width and placement of the colour bands. Roald Nasgaard writes, “Released into play across a field of successive visual experiences, colour in the Stripe Paintings established a ‘fictive space,’ as Molinari called it, of rhythmic scanning, always fleeting and always advancing, each attempt of the viewer to fix an order as quickly destroyed as it is succeeded by another.”

All prices are in Canadian Dollars