Les Plasticiens

also: Plasticiens

movement 1955-1960s Quebec Canada

Les Plasticiens were Canadian non-figurative painters who appeared in Montreal around 1955 as a deliberate reaction against the Surrealist spontaneity of the Automatistes. The critic and painter Rodolphe de Repentigny, writing as Jauran, named the group in a 1954 review and drafted the Manifeste des plasticiens, signed in 1955 with Jean-Paul Jérôme, Louis Belzile, and Fernand Toupin. Where the Automatistes prized the unplanned gesture, the Plasticiens wanted painting to be pure form and color - ordered, impersonal, and self-sufficient - and they looked to Piet Mondrian and the Constructivists for their example. A second generation, including Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant, pushed the idea into hard-edge vertical stripes and concentric targets. The movement made geometric abstraction a central current of Canadian art and a foil for every gestural style that followed.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Hard-edge geometric abstraction: flat, unmodulated color fields with sharp, clean boundaries
  • Vertical bands of uniform width arranged across the canvas (Molinari's Stripe series)
  • Systematic, pre-planned composition with no visible brushwork or spontaneous gesture
  • Pure color relationships as the sole subject - no figuration and no Surrealist symbolism
  • Shaped canvases that treat the painting as an autonomous physical object (Toupin)
  • Concentric circle and target formats exploring the vibration of adjacent colors (Tousignant)

Key figures

  • Jean-Paul Jérôme (1928-2004) — Co-founder of Les Plasticiens and signer of the 1955 manifesto
  • Fernand Toupin (1930-2009) — First-generation Plasticien whose shaped canvases make the painting an object in its own right
  • Louis Belzile (1929-2019) — First-generation Plasticien painter of pure geometric abstraction
  • Guido Molinari (1933-2004) — Second-generation leader; his hard-edge Stripe series (1963-1969) made color the subject
  • Claude Tousignant (b. 1932) — Second-generation painter of concentric circle and target formats from 1962

Example works

  • Manifeste des plasticiens — Jauran (Rodolphe de Repentigny), Jean-Paul Jérôme, Louis Belzile, and Fernand Toupin (1955)
  • Stripe series — Guido Molinari (1963-1969)
  • Structures (checkerboard paintings) — Guido Molinari (1969-1970)

Sources

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