Lot 59
GUIDO MOLINARI
Provenance:
John C. Parkin, Toronto
Private Collection, U.S.A.
Literature:
Pierre Théberge, Guido Molinari (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1976, page 94, cat. no.35, listed and pages 42-46.
Sandra Grant Marchand, Guido Molinari, Une Rétrospective (exhibition catalogue), Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal, 1995, page 49, cat. no. 40, reproduced in colour and page 71, listed.
Exhibited:
Guido Molinari, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1976, cat. no. 35.
Guido Molinari, Une Rétrospective, Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal, 1995, cat. no. 40.
Note:
In a 1965 document analyzing the work of Piet Mondrian, Molinari came to certain conclusions about his own work which are exemplified by this lot: “Wishing to eliminate conflict between object and space, as well as the expressionist interplay of various proportions, I have come to use elements which are alike in quantity (the width of the stripes) and which rely solely on the qualitative function acquired through the particular mutations of a given colour in a rhythmical sequence.”
According to Théberge, Molinari had “no desire to reproduce the structures of the external world.” Rather in the paintings he did in 1966 (the year this work was painted) “Molinari developed the construction of a new pictorial space through increasingly complex combinations of colour stripes on the canvas.”
Molinari believed he had attained “a constantly renewed space-time continuum.” Théberge writes: “Indeed, the use of vertical stripes of the same size over the entire surface of the painting transformed it into an event in which the viewer contributed, through his perception, the temporal factor which altered the structure of the work.” Essentially, the experience was individualized by the viewer, and renewed with each encounter. Furthermore, because the work requires the viewer read the painting from left to right or right to left, art historian François Gagnon posits that “each colour is laden with the perception of the previous one, or at any rate, with the traces it has left in the memory... The actual plastic event seems to be located somewhere between the viewer and the canvas...”