Guido Molinari

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

This is an intriguing painting for those who associate Guido Molinari with hard-edge vertical bands of colour. Two things must be taken into consideration here: first, the date of 1955, and second, the medium of duco on canvas. Under the Duco brand, DuPont Company introduced the first quick-drying multi-colour line of nitrocellulose lacquers made especially for the automotive industry. This medium was also used in paintings by the American artist Jackson Pollock. In January 1955, Molinari made a short trip to New York City. He took advantage of his trip to see some paintings that especially interested him, such as the Wassily Kandinsky at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which Solomon R. Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay, his personal curator and the museum's first director, opened on East 54th Street in Manhattan in 1939, and the Piet Mondrian at the Museum of Modern Art. We know that he was also interested in other recent American painters such as Pollock - he named him in his article "L'espace tachiste ou situation de l'automatisme". During the months that followed, he experimented in "drippings". One of these experiments was presented from November 12 to 30, under the title of Abstraction No. 1, 1955 (in a private collection), in an exhibition organized by Robert Parizeau and Rolande Sainte-Marie at the business school of the Université de Montreal (known as the École des Hautes Études Commerciales).