Untitled

Sans titre (1953), painted in an all-over style, is one of a group of small-format, Automatiste-era paintings in oil on Masonite, executed in one sitting with a narrow palette-knife. This vibrant, expressive body of work, with its dominant reds, yellows, and greens, includes Guido Molinari’s earliest paintings, predating his tachist and hard-edge periods. “In parallel with his hard-edge production, Molinari maintained a very gestural approach, notably in his works on paper,” writes Denise Leclerc in her biography of Molinari in the catalogue Les Plasticiens et les années 1950/60. In effect, Sans titre (1957), the gouache on paper presented here, foregrounds the changes that would soon play out upon the artist’s canvases, changes that would eventually lead to his vertical stripe paintings of the 1960s. “The real shift began on paper, in 1955,” Roald Nasgaard observes. “If we trace the sequence from the small black-and-white drawings to his larger drawings of 1956, we can see how, while remaining intuitive and organic, even tachist, they become increasingly structured, resolving themselves in a coarse geometry with blurred outlines.”