Review: Molinari, The Seventies at the Guido Molinari Foundation

Molinari: Les années 70 is a follow-up to an exhibition from last year which dealt with the painter’s work in the 1960s. Spread over two floors, the exhibition includes several large-scale paintings, a few medium ones, a print, a couple of posters, and several sketches. The latter are either placed in a vitrine or set in neutral frames beside the large paintings that were worked up from them. Aside from the title on the wall, there is only one piece of text in the entire show, a quote from Molinari on the syntax of his work.

The curation is interesting for being so extremely romanticizing in what was likely one of the least romantic periods for the artist. The diagonal pattern with its dynamic ambiguity that the large works privilege is raised to a symbolic level that is likely unintended in the narrative that’s been vaguely constructed.

In the late 1960s, Molinari was regarded by the younger generation of artists as part of the establishment and he sat rather awkwardly amid the new strategies and concerns of artists that were coming to the fore in the 1970s. Even to many of the local critics, Molinari was looking repetitive and old-fashioned, an impression aided by the over-saturation of hard edge work that was being produced and which made it all the more banal. The lack of any ostensible social content also made him look reactionary in the eyes of the radicalized quadrant of the art world.

This was nicely expressed by Camille de Singly, who noted that the decade saw the conflict of alternative “contemporaneities.” If Molinari was identified as one of the most rigorous examples of the attempt to think through medium specificity (whether painting or sculpture), this was challenged by the rising tendencies to blur and jump through multiple media.

In the 60s, Molinari was identified as an artist of the state, which was one of his primary patrons. Somewhat infamously (but correctly), he was vocally opposed to artist grants but supported state purchasing instead, which he asserted would give artists greater freedom. Along with many of the other successful artists in the county in the period, his career was largely made by leveraging his influence on cliques and their role in purchasing committees. In the 1970s, he was scarcely bought by the state. If the previous decade has guaranteed him an international position, by the 70s he was relegated to just being a Canadian painter.

If Molinari had been one of the primary representatives of Canadian art on the international scene in the 1960s, in the 70s, he was excluded from most of the major exhibitions and often derided by the leading curators. Painting in a formalist vein was déclassée and there was a bias for the sociological. This meant he was no longer “contemporary” but was being recast in art discourse as “the historical,” which often (for the time) was accompanied by the ambiguous association with being a “master.” In 1976, he also had a retrospective at the National Gallery in Ottawa and was fit into a historical narrative about the progress of art in the post-war era.

As his wife Fernande Saint-Martin, rose to important positions first in the media and then in the art bureaucracy, he became known as the historical figure and her husband. Unsurprisingly then, the decade also meant that he became a professor (at Sir George Williams University, later Concordia). This gave him a salary and meant he didn’t have to rely on galleries but could be more independent in his painting.

The market was also changing. Although the 70s are often deceptively identified with tendencies toward “dematerialization” and resistance to the commercial aspect of art, it was primarily the opposite that occurred with both state sponsored large works and a proliferation of cheaper multiples. The rise of printmaking was decisive in this. Molinari himself made numerous seriagraphs and sculptures. The only thing in the exhibition that clearly situates Molinari in all this is his poster work for the Olympics, although the diagonal from kinetic art to producing icons for sports tourism is hardly investigated. 

While the exhibition dealing with the previous decade made some overture to historicizing the work, curators Margarida Mafra and Gilles Daigneault do not do so here. In fact, the curation seems to go out of its way not to do this, presenting the works in an almost deliberately isolated and personalized way that almost verges on the folksy. This is accentuated by the preserved presence of a section of his studio which you can poke your head into like a preserved log cabin in a regional history museum, a video in a darkened booth that depicts the artist going about his work to the sounds of emotional string music, and a surprisingly glamorous photo of him sporting a wispy moustache by Gaby from 1964, set on an easel. Indeed, the second floor, with its doors either grids of glass panes or taken from the hinges to reveal the remnants of their hanging, provide a fusion of the concern with the personal and the formal armatures of display.

This romantic side is balanced with a little more pathos than you usually get when exposed to his work. Consistently, his paintings are shown framed, usually with simplified metal or wood. But here, many of the works are not and the sides of the paintings are revealed to be quite rough, raggedy stapled with bubbles of paint and random drips. The small works also clearly show numerous imperfections, blurs, broken lines, and careless spatters that seem to run against the often rigid forms he tended to insist on.

*Terrible installation images were taken by the author.