Page 30 - Studio International - December 1968

(it was a design by Claude Tousignant, for example, that adorned to a situation where normal exhibitions only result in further in-
the publicity for this year's National Gallery exhibition in Paris and comprehension and freeze his sales.
Rome). Founded by the painter-critic Rodolphe de Repentigny in Gaucher's development in some respects resembles the pattern for
1954, 'Les Plasticiens' was the inevitable group-reaction against six several other Montreal painters of his generation—an apprenticeship
years of abstract expressionism in Montreal. Molinari, who was then in l'informel giving way to its opposite, in exclusively formal idioms,
21, was one of several younger Montreal painters, including geometric configurations, and hard, sharp colour with elements of
Tousignant, for whom the movement was decisive. He had entered `op'. But the development came relatively late and through a
the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the year of the Borduas-Riopelle mani- different discipline. Until 1965 Gaucher was almost exclusively a
festo, Refus global, and he worked his way through the full auto- print-maker, with an international reputation for his technical in-
matist aesthetic. Among his early drawings are surrealistically- vention and richness of texture and imagery. A reading of Albers'
inclined free fantasies which are reminescent in terms of Klee, `Interaction of Colour' and the implications of the music of Webern
Masson and Archimboldo. For eight months he practised painting combined, during 1963-4, to convert him to a wholly formal
blindfold, and experimented with drip-techniques and a palette- language. A series of 'geometric' prints, in which a use of pure colour
knife 'tachisme' in uniform colours. But by the mid-1950s he was against the whiteness of the paper presumably did something to
established as the driving force of the new style and the Montreal affect his subsequent attitude towards the relationship between
avant garde, almost more active as polemicist than painter, and figure and ground, prepared the way for his return to painting. His
running his own gallery, L'Actuelle, to champion types of non- first canvases were diamond-shaped, with a sharpness of colour that
figurative art for which at that time there was little local sympathy. matched the angular energy of the format. But Gaucher's sensibility
A series of black and white abstracts painted in 1956-7, later (it is something more than purist rigour) has inclined more and
exhibited in New York, were of a formal austerity which broke more to a sort of meditative quietism. The format inevitably became
radically with Montreal tradition, and by the beginning of the 1960s rectangular, sometimes square; the colour paled; the dynamism of
his Mondrian-inspired drive towards 'pure painting' had begun to abrupt, geometric elements narrowed to a few, thin horizontal lines.
develop the totality of surface-stress, the strict vertical emphasis and The `Alap' paintings are named after the slow movement of the
taut images of colour contrast which have remained the character- Indian raga (himself a musician, Gaucher has for the second time
istics of his style. overtly related a crucial stylistic development to musical thought).
Molinari's peculiar distinction lies in the quality, rather than the
fact, of his colour. Hard-edge colour-painting is the Montreal trade- Yves Gaucher, Cercle de grande reserve, acrylic on canvas. 60 in. to the
side. Coll : Art Gallery of Ontario
mark, usually conceived with the staccato vibrancy of 'op' intentions.
Molinari exploits the vibrancy as forcefully as anyone, but its
rhythms are richer and deeper. His vertical-stripe format is in itself
almost deliberately anonymous and unoriginal —as an efficient
rationalization of the two-dimensional surface, the device has
attracted a good many painters who want to concentrate un-
distractedly on colour-organization (one has only to think of Riley
in Britain and Gene Davis in the States). But Molinari's stripes are
exceptional in being relatively broad and relatively few. They slow
down the optical interchange of his colour, and keep it forcibly held
back to the flatness and large lateral spread of the surface. The effect
is less of the energy of colour than of its resonance and orchestration,
in a way which is rare in Canadian painting and tends to look
European. It works in terms of sonorous chords and counterpoint
(the musical analogy may be well-worn, but is possibly not in-
appropriate in view of Molinari's recognition of musical tastes in-
herited from his father), and its organization by serial repetition and
inversion registers, not only as classical discipline, but as a profoundly
sensuous experience: I imagine it looked naturally at home in Venice
this year. The result is colour-painting that works not on the nerves
but on the emotions, and a manipulation of colour contrast in which
tension and brilliance are remarkably allied to spaciousness and — a
quality that only one or two Canadian painters can match—a solid,
unhurried grandeur of presence.

Yves Gaucher
Gaucher embarked on an important series of recent paintings, con-
ceived as a group of twelve canvases on what is for him the large
scale of some 8 ft by 10 ft, with a financial grant from the Canada Essentially they are refinements of his conception of painting as the
Council and an offer from the Vancouver Art Gallery to exhibit the `contemplation of a certain state of colour', in that they concentrate
series as an entity on completion. The reassurance which Canadian on shades and tones of grey as colour-sensation without, as it were,
artists receive by such 'official' gestures of confidence is as valuable colour itself. Across this uniform ground float thin bars of slightly
as it is far-sighted. Gaucher, at 35, is one of the most respected figures darker or lighter tonality—'float' both because Gaucher is here dis-
in Canadian painting, but his art is caviare to the general. It is too posing his linear elements for the first time asymmetrically, and
logical, too austere, too restrained. In a country where the prestige because their presence introduces subtle ambiguities into a reading
of international exposure and recognition can't yet be exploited, and of the surface as unlocalized space. The effect of such reticent
where there is practically no tradition of informed criticism, such a simplicity on this large scale is visual silence of a kind that heightens
painter could easily be left high and dry. Gaucher himself is resigned perception more intensely and more poetically than any of the
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