Art in Montreal

The new exhibition at Fondation Guido Molinari takes a fundamentally different tack than its last few historical shows. Molinari the 60s and the 70s were both defined by decade, although this was limited to the highlighting of a small body of work and contained only slight means for contextually making their historical framing very meaningful. As a result, while interesting, the curation of the paintings did not typically shed much light on them, nor did it let either simply stand as a show of works. The latter quality is something that is clearly present in Art Mûr’s current show of Claude Tousignant works, mixing those from the 1950s with some more recent ones. Making very little effort to historicize them, they stand quite comfortably as another current exhibition. The show at the Molinari, by contrast, does something very different. Curated by Marie Fraser, L’œil attentif , is described as reconstructing “a fragment of the The Responsive Eye exhibition presented in 1965 at th...

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.

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.