Plasticien
Description
The movement was launched in 1955 by the Manifeste des plasticiens, written by de Repentigny (under the name Jauran) and signed by Louis Belzile, Jean-Paul Jérôme and Fernand Toupin. In the manifesto they acknowledged a kind of debt to the Automatists, recognizing their place in the revolutions that had helped to free the arts from “servitude to a materialistic ritual”.
They also called on artists to follow the example of Piet Mondrian. The Plasticiens sought to objectify paintings instead of paint objects. For example, Toupin shaped his own canvases into geometric shapes so that they would be objects of another kind. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Rodolphe de Repentigny (Jauran)
Art critic and painter who co-authored the 1955 Manifeste des plasticiens under the pseudonym Jauran, urging Canadian artists to abandon emotional Automatism for formal order and geometric purity.
Louis Belzile
Co-founder of Les Plasticiens who signed the 1955 manifesto and created serene, hard-edged geometric abstractions emphasizing precise spatial balance and flat color planes.
Jean-Paul Jérôme
Co-founding signatory of the 1955 manifesto whose rigorous, non-figurative geometric paintings explored the pure structural relationships between line, shape, and pigment.
Fernand Toupin
Founding Plasticien who experimented with shaped canvases, textured geometric surfaces, and disciplined spatial compositions breaking away from spontaneous gesture.
Guido Molinari
Leading second-generation Plasticien who radicalized Montreal geometric painting in the late 1950s and 1960s with his hard-edged vertical stripe paintings exploring optical color vibrations and serial repetition.
Claude Tousignant
Prominent second-generation Plasticien and close collaborator of Molinari known for his monumental circular target paintings (Gongs) and absolute insistence on flat, objective chromatic space.
Famous Artworks
Fun Facts
Les Plasticiens emerged in Montreal in 1955 as a direct revolt against Paul-Émile Borduas and the Refus global Automatisme movement, arguing that spontaneous emotional pouring had become a messy orthodoxy that ignored the structural architecture of the canvas.
↗ Source: thecanadianencyclopedia.ca
To achieve absolute flatness and eliminate all traces of the artist's personal brushwork, second-generation Plasticiens like Claude Tousignant and Guido Molinari adopted industrial masking tape, acrylic rollers, and high-gloss automotive enamels across monumental canvases.
↗ Source: thecanadianencyclopedia.ca