Review: Alexis Lavoie's Séjours at Simon Blais

Fruit bowls, dolls and their dismembered limbs, stickers, and what look like renderings of film stills are what make up the minimal contents of Alexis Lavoie’s latest show at Simon Blais.

Childhood imagery has long been part of his work. This used to be theatricalized in a deliberate way, working on larger canvases with architectural settings. There were also clear and consistent nods to Francis Bacon and to media events like Abu Ghraib, all slit in amid the birthday decorations for a kid’s party.

These paintings (selected from work made between 2019-2022) don’t have that scope of content. Lavoie’s latest oils follow the direction to greater minimalism that he seems to have been going in over his past few shows. This is true in terms of his treatment of surfaces, his range of referents, and his use of scale.

The imagery primarily consists of doll limbs, fruit, and bowls. There is a studied sense of painting plastic while flattening the plasticity of the paint application as much as possible. As a set of images, the paintings offer variations on their basic objects, sometimes reconstituting them in surprising ways.

The grotesque chamber opera of previous years has given way to miniatures which have their own nightmarish qualities. A profile in Le Devoir from a few years ago linked his work to Denis Vanier, and he does share some of the poet’s sense of perverse juxtaposition. However, Lavoie has become less overtly confrontational.

In Lévitation or Ce qui reste there is a kind of horror in some of the images of doll bodies and not-quite-human ones that are spouting eyes where they wouldn’t normally have them, all accented by a strong sense of line that adds another dimension to the stillness that these works have.

The bowls of fruit, of course, are the most generic of still life and the inclusion of dismembered doll parts gives them a ludicrousness. Yet, there is little sense of the morbid in all this. In their composition, the paintings are aggressive about making evident the isolation of their elements, the near total cauterization of touch, and the lack of any common world of light to the objects.

This quality is made that much more obvious by the almost throbbing use of bright colour throughout. The still life refers not only to a genre but also to the photographic imagery he uses in his juxtapositions. It is colour alone that gives the work its jolting vitality, albeit one that seems to instantly run into a wall.

Nature morte and the fragments of childhood memory meet on this surface which successfully desentimentalizes them. Dead nature doesn’t have the capacity to be morbid or contaminate, but only to sit like the stickers that dot his depictions of the hand (presumable the artist’s).

The most awkward statement of this otherwise relatively subtly handled aspect is in Entre deux, where the still life sits on a smeared glove and deforms it, the painting smeared around the area of performative contact like the half-cooked coagulation of spilled liquid in a microwave.