Art in Montreal

Jérôme Fortin’s Dance: choreographic variations for the eye at Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain involves two sets of monotypes. One series ( Danser ) is more interesting as a concept, the evidence of which you are left with, while the other ( Lignes ) is more visually stimulating. Composed of 50 pieces, for Danser Fortin folded, unfolded, and refolded strips of paper before printing them on sheets of paper so that only their reliefs remained. The results are mildly decorative, with a loosely elliptical quality and, if one wished to playfully extrapolate, are suggestive of the muddled foot moves of an old dance instruction manual. As to their tactility, it is slight, and as a whole they register more as background noise than a set of images. Stretching them out along the wall as they are gives them some animation, but it’s a bit limpid.

Art is free, or it is not. It invents, expresses itself and explores in all directions, or commits suicide by serving causes that are not its own. It is plural, diverse, crazy; or doctrinaire, intolerant and terribly serious. It asks questions to which we are fed answers everywhere. It stimulates the imagination, awakens utopias, and offers man the only game that rules do not hinder. And in this way, art energetically calls the whole environment into question. [29] Published in 1983, Guy Robert’s Art actuel au Québec: depuis 1970 provided an extensive survey of the art produced in the province in the 70s and early 80s (most of the art reproduced in the text is from 1980-1982.) It is a follow-up to his L'Art au Québec depuis 1940 of 1973 and examines what he takes to be the diversity of the plastic arts, under numerous names and tendencies, since the 1970s.  Robert insists on it as an essay or interrogation attentive to the role of the "socio-cultural" in art since t

Tiny perceptions are as much he passage from one perception to the another as they are components of perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are ‘pricklings,’ or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain. - Gilles Deleuze  Occupying three rooms in the basement space of Bradley Ertaskiran , Mathieu Beauséjour’s Demi-monde operates through three distinct stations. The first features three images, each a superimposition that abstracts images of bodies and exaggerates the grain of their source material. The second is a series of white painted boxes with walls torn out to reveal miniature rooms, all crudely made, their various staircases and bunkers suggesting both the exhibition space and the illusionism of Escher, only run into dead ends instead of infinities. And third, the largest of the spaces contains a video projection, several brass sculptures, medium-sized photographic works, and four sets of diced image

There is a curious affinity between two shows on at the Belgo. Both exhibitions involve games of distances, projections of bodies, whether they are human, celestial, or the guts of houses. Le murmure d'une empreinte by Caroline Mauxion (with Céline Huyghebaert and Elise Anne LaPlante) at Arprim attempts to capture the subtle and ephemeral traces of the body in space, heightening its suggestiveness to a poetic density through abstracting it into fragmented and de-familarized aspects of flesh and simplified sculpture renderings.

Sponsored by Caisse Desjardins and AC/E’s Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture, the VOX exhibition’s opening pedagogical text asserts that the works in L’imaginaire radical II: désœuvrer la valeur collectively propose to offer a set of hypothetical alternatives (which they identify as: “1) decolonize/ecologize; 2) measure; 3) organize; 4) speculate/fabulate”) to the “knowledge” offered by financial models, defined in terms of legibility and statistics. More fully: This exhibition and its accompanying events and texts speak to an attempt to produce “finance-proof” knowledge—that is to say, a space in which to consider the notion of value and its forms that is immune to the economic categorical imperative. That imperative, of course, is that of growth and profitability: the dominion of measurement, of the readability of indexes, of statistical commensurability. In the place of this, the curatorial position statement suggests, are a set of rival propositions or p

Antoine Larocque ’s Acheter une maison, l’assurer et calicer le feu d’dan s at Galerie Laroche|Joncas is one of the more startling things I’ve seen in a Montréal gallery for some time. This is primarily down to how explicitly and aggressively Québécois it is, a trait that is increasingly rare in contemporary art in the province (not that it has been common since the 1970s). Unsurprisingly then, the works displayed explicitly link to the province in the 1970s, to the October Crisis ( Leur police attrapent un Chaoin radical ) and up to the presence of Legault ( François Legault ), as well as the marginal lives of the rural populace.