Jean Goguen

Les Plasticiens Four young artists, all in theirmidtolate twenties—Jauran, Louis Belzile, Jean-Paul Jérôme, Fernand Toupin—unveiled a personal exhibition, Les Plasticiens, in the gallery space at L’Échourie (February 11 to March 2, 1955). They promoted their cause with a strikingly designed abstractgeometric poster and with a manifesto, the Manifeste des Plasticiens, that defined their aesthetic program. The event has been called Montreal’s second avant-garde revolution after the Automatistes in the 1940s. “It is especially urgent to solicit the collective participation with the purpose of constructing a livable world”. - Jean Goguen Jean Goguen Jean Goguen became a Plasticien because he was convinced that form, colour and matter were the fundamentals of the art discourse; he insisted on incorporating chromatic lyricism in his geometric structures. Goguen claimed, however, that unlike his fellow artists in Art abstract, he was not following Mondrian nor did he have any other connections with European geometric abstraction, but had chanced upon geometry while painting much more gesturally. As he tells it, it was entirely by accident that “a small, white square” appeared on the black and white painting he was working on. “The dynamism of this little square was so intense that it forced me to totally restructure the canvas around it. This is when I became convinced of colour’s energizing quality and the value of geometry in abstraction.”59 However that may be, through a long series of large gestural black and white ink works on paper, which he executed during the 1950s. Goguen spoke in the language of Neo-Plasticist utopia, intending his work to participate in the creation of a larger social good.

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