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.

Ce guide indique où sont inhumés les artistes plasticiens qui ont fait la grandeur artistique de la France
Ce guide indique où sont inhumés les artistes plasticiens qui ont fait la grandeur artistique de la FranceCC BY-SA 4.0 (credit: Lithograveur) · 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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