A rereading of Stéphane Mallarmé's poem, “Un coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard,” through twelve paintings by Guido Molinari.

"MALLARMED, CURSED, FORGOTTEN, VENERATED.

MOLINARI, SQUARE, POINTED, CURSED: Equivalence.

In Quebec, we don't read, or very little. Mallarmé, even less so. Too difficult. The enigma is repeated, the secret slips away. Sense, in its early youth, wants clarity. Here, we like the obvious. We look for certain certainties around which to build a life. The State took over from the priests. We are reforming education. Secondary school reform is being postponed. We are looking for a path. Molinari, do him a lot of good. Never entered secondary school. He made do with the basic essentials, learned to read, count and, in the mystery of early tuberculosis, to seek, beyond precarious certainties, a path only he could take. (...)

Mallarmé-Molinari, twin roses. Men of misunderstood senses and, I don't know why, of opposite directions, one tending towards rediscovered order (although Molinari lives in a fabulous disorder, he comes alive to the beauty of mathematical thought, of the demonstrated theorem) , the other tempted by chaos, dispersing the words on the page and forcing by them the I admit defeat. Beyond the world, life. After us the flood, I would be tempted to say, thereby adopting a feminine point of view. Molinari gave one of his paintings this astonishing title Victoire sur l'infini. He who loves time fights with space and finds in a double sense the meaning of the shattered constellations."

Jocelyne Légaré