PHOTO ESSAY
That '60s Show
The National Gallery embraces the flower power decade
By Liz Hodgson
 Orange and Green Bi-serial by Guido Molinari. Courtesy National Gallery of Canada. |
Guido Molinari (1933-2004)
Orange and Green Bi-serial
1967
Acrylic on canvas
Guido Molinari’s Orange and Green Bi-serial is yet another blurring of the connection between art and the artist. Using bold squares of colour, Molinari sought to create something that was purely about form without the filter of personality. In this sense, he was working in the vein of Piet Mondrian, the Dutch abstract painter whose graphic renderings of black bars interwoven with bright yellow and red rectangles are now the stuff of gallery-shop postcards. Having Mondrian as an influence was much more controversial than it sounds. It put Molinari in blatant conflict with the influential automatists. Led by Paul-Emile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle, the goal of the automatists was to create work that was the result of pure, unconscious instinct. They applied thick dollops of paint in a frenzied, anarchic flourish. Molinari dismissed this as nonsense. Like his forerunner Mondrian, his paint was carefully and judiciously applied.
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