Peinture fraiche et nouvelle construction 2022 at Art Mûr.
For better and worse, kitsch abounds at the latest edition of Art Mûr’s annual showing of work plucked from university programmes across the country. Whether it is a sign of curatorial bias or the homogeneity of current academic art, this year’s exhibition felt much more cohesive than the past few. It was mostly nicely arranged and flowed well.
While sculpture in the country may be reaching a new low, if this and the work I have seen from the biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine are any indications, some of the painting is at least likable. I’ll address the sculpture problem at some other date.
While the non-representational work consists almost entirely of the uniformly forgettable glittery-blob-deformed-diacritic-with-some-scrawling stuff that has been popping up for years, the figurative work is more interesting.
None of it is quite decorative, but it’s pretty close. The more striking thing was how dated (and I don’t mean nostalgic since nostalgia has a sorrowful self-consciousness that’s mostly absent here) so much of it feels. Here are a few notes...
Sophia Kyungwon Kim: Light, unpretentious mushroom paintings.
Alexander Ranger: Mediocre second year technical college figure painting against silver. The only interesting thing about it is that it borders on becoming aggressively bland.
Mathilde Demoli: Awkwardly sets sculpture and painting together in an over-literal way. The sculptures of animal remains are too flat and shiny to seem like more than melted hard candy and even this aspect is undermined by its display form. Nicely rendered wallpaper in the paintings and some detailing that hasn’t quite negotiated the kind of morbidity that it is bringing in. Good potential.
Emerald Repard-Denniston: Garish, slightly nauseatingly hued (in the overworked performative mode more common 15 years ago) but fairly charming cluttered together figurations in contemporary variants of genre scenes.
Senka Stankovic: Heavy-handed Manet re-enactments set in Ottawa’s neo-liberal design nightmare. The treatment of the surface never reaches the point that they really work. There’s something stunted still.
Marie-Danielle Duval: In a similar vein to above, only more refined. Seems poached from Beaver Hall era Vogue imitations, simplified to over-the-couch condo paintings.
Kellyann Henderson: Anecdote saturated “white trash gothic,” (that's more Newfoundland Gauguin) heavy on tattoos, referentiality, insects and brightly cluttered with illustrator’s linearity. Interesting, maybe needs more condensing.
Maxime Boisvert-Huneault: More bug-oriented stuff amid drawing manual technical exercises. The tension between drawing and painting doesn’t seem strong enough to be effective.
Brooklyn Payne: Blown-up magic realist sapphic romance novel covers. Probably the best part of the show.
After the show, I stepped off the metro and accidentally walked through the world naked bike ride protest, which was 40 to 50 40 to 80-year-old-men with flaccid penises and political flags pedaling slowly through downtown surrounded by the flashing lights of a police escort, the appalled gasps of women on the street and seizuring homeless men. By the bus station, a man covered himself in duct tape while blaring Shania Twain.