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
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