Guido Molinari (1933-2004)
By Daphne Richard
Guido Molinari, Mutation Quadri-Violet, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 172.7 x 105.6 cm, Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montréal.
Image courtesy of Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montréal.
Guido Molinari was an artist, critic, and theoretician who spearheaded his own philosophy on what it means to reflect on pictorial space without conscious thought. Born on 12 October 1933 in Montréal, Canada, Molinari’s career properly began in 1947 when he won an award for a rather contemporary oil painting. From early on, Molinari was recognized for his use of vivid colours and bold lines. He enrolled in night classes at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (ÉBAM) and, in 1951, was accepted to their drawing program, though Molinari dropped out after three days! During this time, he read works by Friedrich Nietzsche and André Breton, whilst discovering Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Paul Émile-Borduas, who all primed the base of his philosophic and artistic career. Molinari’s art practice quickly became gestural as he devoted his time to finding freedom from the confines of formalistic structure and syntax of modernism.
Molinari later found semblance in the works of the Automatistes, a Canadian group who created art without conscious thought. It was in their work where Molinari located his defining abstraction. His artwork Black/White (1956) encapsulates the rigidity of hard-edge painting; a visual caesura of colour is established by the harshly juxtaposed black and white bands. This painting ignores the conscious decision required to find purpose in three-dimensional space and is simply a geometric abstraction. Here, there is no tangible link between consciousness and artmaking.
In the latter half of the 1960s, Molinari became focused on painting vertical bands with oil paint. Much like Black/White, he used harsh juxtaposing colours whilst maintaining extreme saturation. His Mutation Quadri-Violet (1966), pictured above, uses shifting, bright tones of red, green, blue, and purple. The intensity of colour produces a near optical illusion. Molinari rejects the dominance of a single colour whilst ridding of any soft-hard contrasts; it is boldly defined by its graphic clarity. His gradations of colours are deliberate in that they are the opposite of the ones next to them. The harsh tones of red in Mutation Quadri-Violet always stand next to the bright, cool tones of blue, green, or purple. At no point is there texture or a break in the perfectly linear bands. His philosophy hung in the notion that his art was not designed to stem from conscious thought which contrasts with his exclusively conscious and deliberate choice of form and colour.
Although Molinari is referred to as a prominent Automatiste, he would fervently denounce this designation and reassert himself as a ‘Molinarist’. The artist asserted that “[I] have never been part of the Automatiste group–Stop–Therefore cannot be its theoretician–Stop–I am the theoretician of Molinarism.” This quote comes from a letter he wrote to a magazine that called him not only a member, but rather a theoretician, of the Automatistes. He staunchly stood for his own beliefs, yet followed others and their ideas, not necessarily a singular philosophy; perhaps he was just a ‘Molinarist’ in a way that his contemporaries and critics did not give him credit for.
Bibliography
Tate. “Automatism.” Accessed September 30, 2025. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/automatism.
Gagnon, François-Marc, Roald Nasgaard, Marc Séguin, and Bernard Teyssèdre.. Molinari. Guido Molinari Foundation, 2018.
Welsh, Robert. “Molinari and the Science of Colour and Line.” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 5, no. 1 (1978): 3–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42630122.