Fernand Toupin was born in 1930 in Montreal and studied at the École des beaux-arts. When he showed irregular format paintings in 1956 (Galerie l’Actuelle), he came the closest among the Plasticiens to accentuating the objectivity of the canvas. In fact, in 1955 four young artists in their twenties – Jauran (Rodolphe de Repentigny), Louis Belzile, Jean-Paul Jérôme and Fernand Toupin – who called themselves Plasticiens, launched their own exhibition, accompanied by their Manifeste des Plasticiens. They proclaimed an alternative to the Automatistes, one based not on a chance but on the more rigorous traditions of geometric abstraction, citing Mondrian as a forerunner. Repentigny greeted Toupin’s works with enthusiasm, regarding their break with the regular conventions of the canvas as a significant step towards the further integration of painting into the ambience of the wall. He called the paintings “tableaux-objects”, perhaps borrowing the term from the French Neo-Plasticist Jean Gorin, who had used it to describe his desire to unify more closely the art object into its architectural ensemble. Toupin died in Montreal in 2009.