The Plasticien movement was a Canadian non-figurative painting movement, which appeared around 1955 in

Quebec Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...

. It was a more orderly style of painting in reaction to

Les Automatistes Les Automatistes were a group of Québécois artistic dissidents from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The movement was founded in the early 1940s by painter Paul-Émile Borduas. Les Automatistes were so called because they were influenced by Surrea ...

In 1954, a young critic and painter newly returned from Paris, Rodolphe de Repentigny, reviewed an exhibition of four young artists whom he called 'Les Plasticiens'. The name itself expressed their exclusive concern with the abstract properties of painting. They focused on colors, lines, contrast; completely rejecting the idea of Surrealism and their attachment to the idealism of the European Constructivist movement. He pointed out the difference of their approach from automatism. In his criticism he wrote:

Every painting must have its own particular form to make a totality, resistant to and not assimilated by an ambiance and where each part depends on the whole and vice-versa.

The movement was launched in 1955 by the ''Manifeste des plasticiens'', written by de Repentigny (under the name Jauran) and signed by

Louis Belzile Louis Belzile (April 17, 1929 – February 12, 2019) was one of the main figures in geometric abstraction in painting in Quebec and one of the members of the Plasticiens group in Montreal along with Rodolphe de Repentigny (Jauran), Jean-Paul Jér ...

, 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 Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, , ), was a Dutch Painting, painter and Theory of art, art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He w ...

. 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. Guido Molinari created Plasticien works between 1959 and 1962. Other artists associated with the movement are Claude Tousignant, Denis Juneau, Fernand Leduc and more distantly, George E. Russell.

References

{{Western art movements Quebec art Modern art Canadian art movements Culture of Quebec Canadian artist groups and collectives History of art in Canada