Plasticien

The Plasticien movement was a Canadian non-figurative painting movement that emerged in Quebec around 1955, named by the critic Rodolphe de Repentigny (writing as Jauran) in a 1954 review of four young Montreal painters. It was formally launched by the Manifeste des plasticiens (1955), written by de Repentigny and signed by Louis Belzile, Jean-Paul Jérôme and Fernand Toupin. Reacting against the Surrealist automatism of Paul-Émile Borduas and the Automatistes, the Plasticiens sought an orderly, constructive abstraction devoted to colour, line and contrast, explicitly invoking Piet Mondrian and European Constructivism; the painting was to be a self-sufficient object rather than a picture of something. A second generation - Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant among them - carried the program into the hard-edge colour painting of the 1960s.

Defining characteristics

• Hard-edge geometric abstraction with crisp, flat, unmodulated colour fields
• Vertical bands and modular geometric formats of equal width
• Pure, saturated colour relationships - often complementary contrasts - carrying the composition
• No figuration, gesture, or visible brushwork: a deliberate, controlled surface
• Shaped canvases that treat the painting as a geometric object in its own right
• Tightly ordered wholes in which every part depends on the total structure

Key figures

• Jean-Paul Jérôme (1928-2004) — Co-founder and manifesto signatory; a key figure of Quebec abstraction
• Guido Molinari (1933-2004) — Leading figure of the second generation, celebrated for his serial hard-edge Stripe paintings
• Fernand Leduc (1916-2014) — Canadian abstract painter counted among the movement's associates

Example works

• Stripe series — Guido Molinari (1963-1969)
• Série noir/blanc — Guido Molinari (1967)
• Quantificateur series — Guido Molinari (late 1970s)

Sources

• Plasticien - Wikipedia encyclopedia
• Les Plasticiens - Wikipedia encyclopedia

← Back to the catalog