Sold for: $94,400

PROVENANCE
Grunwald & Watterson Gallery, Toronto
Acquired from the above by a Private Collection, Toronto, April 6, 1988
Sold sale of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 23, 2016, lot 38

LITERATURE
James D. Campbell, Molinari Studies, 49th Parallel, 1987, page 42
Sandra Grant Marchand et al., Guido Molinari: une rétrospective, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1995, a similar 1987 painting entitled Quantificateur rouge numéro 3, collection of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, reproduced page 61

Guido Molinari’s Quantifier series began in 1975, and it was an important part of his oeuvre for 20 years. These paintings were often large in scale and monochrome, and they exert a powerful effect on the senses. James Campbell wrote, “Molinari chose the title Quantifiers (Quantificateurs Chromatique) to describe ‘painting environments’ in which colour-light, quantified in terms of mass, forms a ‘fictional’ space that impinges upon and subsumes the consciousness of the viewer.” In the works from this series, colour is fully saturated and dense, space is completely flat, and vertical, irregular divisions are differentiated by subtle tonal differences. To achieve these flat surfaces, without texture, Molinari applied paint by rollers or spraying, creating no distraction from the effulgence of their colour fields. In these works, colour is form, expressing the structural energy of masses. The interactions between the vertical divisions create a shifting state, as they transfer energy from one to the other, challenging our perceptions. This stunning, radiant Quantificateur rouge envelops the viewer with its red force field, its power exhibiting Molinari’s mastery of pictorial space.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars