Additional Images

Provenance:

Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg, MB/Toronto, ON;
Private collection, Abbotsford, BC

Note:

By painting Sans titre in 1953, Molinari beat and bettered American painter Frank Stella to the punch by keeping his paint as good and as pure as it was in the tube. Barely 20 years old, Molinari’s foray signalled an audacity and genius at the outset of a half-century long career. In 1953 Molinari began his determined commitment to paint abstractions, and in Sans titre he extended Paul-Émile Borduas’s exploration of paint as a material with inherent physical properties by taking those properties as given, and advancing from there.

In contrast to Group of Seven artists who by necessity travelled light when working en plein air, Molinari painted in the studio. Unlike Tom Thomson, Peter Clapham Sheppard, or a Group of Seven artist who fashioned their greens with yellow and blue, Molinari would use the best green (or any colour) direct from the tube. This also conferred integrity to each colour he applied and manipulated in his early abstractions. Sans titre describes nothing, it is an abstraction from nothing, and it does not describe a fictional space in the manners of Wassily Kandinsky, Yves Tanguay, or even Borduas at this time. Each passage of Molinari’s six colours is painted with brushstrokes layered over the other. The colours’ values incite movement into and away from the picture plane in the manner of Hans Hofmann, yet Molinari keeps the viewer’s eyes and mind engaged more deeply.

In size and technique Sans titre is some distance from Molinari’s Mutation paintings of the middle 1960s that resounded strongly in the moments of Op art and Minimalism. In its conception, however, Sans titre shares significantly with the Mutation paintings and is part of Molinari’s vital groundwork. In both cases his confrontation with paint as material, and colour as material with no preconceptions was historic. This aligns him with his American contemporaries Donald Judd and Dan Flavin who were often crudely, if inaccurately, labelled Minimalists.