Molinari, the 1960s at the fondation Guido Molinari displays 9 of his acrylic paintings, 2 seriagraphs, 1 sculpture, a collage, and some preliminary sketches. It takes up the entire exhibition space, including the vault. Some remnants of the artist’s studio are maintained in a corner and can be peered into.
While the juxtaposition of differentiated areas gives the show a very loose developmental narrative, not much else helps it along.
The wall texts are primarily quotations from reviews and catalogues which provide a broad suggestion of the theoretical undepinnings of some of the work. The small historicizing texts and images, displayed by dates as in a ledger, provide an extremely vague context. But it is context that seems otherwise absent.
The 60s were a crucial period in his work and the mechanics of the art world in Canada at the time go some way to explaining why he became one of the country’s few high-profile artists.
However, nothing within the curation would enlighten you to this and it certainly isn’t self-evident from viewing the works themselves. This leads one to wonder why it was organized around such a historicizing and periodizing axis rather than a strictly formal one, which would have been as easy, and begged far few questions, or at least very different ones.
Molinari had been showing in New York since the 1950s and by the mid-1960s he had become an “international” artist, selected to represent Canada or Québec in foreign territories or appear on his own as an exponent of broader tendencies among artists.
He created the Actuelle galerie in Montréal in 1955, showing there several times before it closed in 1957, and was pivotal to the Art abstrait exhibition in 1959.
In the early 1960s, for the local media he was the caricature of an artist, half anarchist/half rationalist, whose work was often dismissed by critics as simple-minded and decorative. For other journalists, his work seemed to verge on the inhuman or a wish to be so.
By the mid-60s he was being recognized in New York in association with hard-edge painting and began being bought by major collectors. Although he had been excluded from 1964’s Post-painterly Abstraction show (in part, perhaps, because he and Clement Greenberg had an acrimonious relationship), he was featured in 1965’s The Responsive Eye exhibition at MOMA and he became associated with OpArt.
After this, the press in Canada (at least the English side) became significantly more generous to him (although Guy Robert continued to consider him a joke, and Molinari helped oust him from his job at the Musée contemporain).
By late in the decade Molinari was being selected as a primary representative of Canadian art, both at the time of the centenary of confederation and at the Venice Biennial.
By the beginning of the following decade, he was denounced by a new generation of artists as the establishment etc.
His work was being collected by museums, the Council of Arts, and promoted by the National Gallery, which selected him for travelling exhibitions and gave him a leading role in many of their major group shows on Canadian art.
His heavy promotion by the federal government and high sales in Toronto did not lead to him being similarly appreciated in Québec.
Both by himself and by others, he was identified with new trends in American art and a shift from European influences. It also served as a perfect signature for the state’s definition of Canadian art, which was that it was art made on legally Canadian territory.
Molinari rejected being associated with any art movement other than his own. He benefited greatly from the country’s highly regionalistic cultural policies and from the leading role that the Plasticiens were accorded in coverage of Montréal’s art scene.
Being married to Fernande Saint-Martin also helped, and her writing for Vie des Arts, Art International and other publications did a lot to cement his reputation and a very particular historiography of Québécois art.
His work was typically identified by critics as part of one stream of post-Mondrian abstraction and with OpArt and perceptual painting. Broader than the severe limits of de Stijl, perceptual painting still sought to strip away most associations, allowing for the nakedness of sight to be intensified and activated in a visual field through the elimination of any conflict between the object and space.
The painting is not an illusion but an object. The nonobjective work concerns the mechanics of the eye, the means and materials for perceiving, not through various conceptual categories, but within the most rudimentary kind of materiality that does away with the privileging of the painterly surface that had been central to so much earlier abstraction.
Colour has a “diagrammatic” function but also a potentially poetic one. Regardless of how reductive paintings such as his may be, they can also evocative and interactive. They could be made of extreme, programmatic or eccentric, combinations of starkly alternative colours, or they could rely on a minimization of colour values to the point of being nearly imperceptible. If the contemplation this demands makes the perceptual paintings seem mystical, they are equally demonstrative.
There’s a strategic play by the artist to avoid suggestiveness so that perception won’t slip back into association. As Seitz wrote in The Responsive Eye catalogue, “A degree of softening or variation of edging cannot be excluded, however, for it is efficacy, not theory, that governs a choice of means.”
Different strategies are necessary to dissuade the mind from unifying and tranquillizing the visual field. The bands of colour that Molinari deployed were his attempt to create what he termed a “point of no return.” After that point, one encounters a field of optical vibration.
If the historicizing curatorial aspect of the exhibition leaves a lot to be desired, the works themselves are appropriately selected and not too crowded together. It has the kind of flat, neutral lighting that I always seem to encounter when I see Molinari’s work exhibited, although I’ve never been convinced they are the best way to view them.