Art in Montreal

This year marked the first instance of Plural, the city's Contemporary Art fair. It is not wholly new, but the successor to Papier, which ran for 15 years. Involving 45 Canadian contemporary art galleries, Plural occurred at the Grand Quay in Montréal’s Old Port (April 21-23, 2023). Launched in Westmount in 2007 and initially involving significantly fewer galleries, Papier gradually moved downtown, occupying a tent for several iterations before moving indoors, spending several years at Arsenal and other venues before moving to the Quay. For the past several years (barring the pandemic virtual year), it has taken in around 11,000 attendees and $1-1.5 million in sales on average. This year it was possible for the public to view artworks for free through the virtual fair that ran from April 21 to May 7, 2023. The event was organized by The Contemporary Art Galleries Association ( AGAC ) “a non-profit organization that actively contributes to the dissemination and promotion of Canadi

Covering the “legendary period in Québec” of 1967 to 1977, Anithe de Carvalho’s Art rebelle et contre-culture (2015) seeks to “demystify” the myths around the Underground (or counterculture) and its role in the expanding apparatus of the Canadian government in the period. “I will try to demonstrate,” she writes, “Contrary to what some authors have claimed, that the politicised neo-avant-garde has not succeeded in its bet to remain on the fringe of the establishment and to work outside the system or the institutional field of art.” [9] Not only did it not succeed in staying “marginal,” but it has remained central to the state production of art since that period. She uses an array of works to examine the “de-compartmentalization [décloisonnement] of the paradigm of the democratization of culture and …the beginnings of the cultural democracy model.” [55] Among these is: Les Mécaniques, Les Mondes parallèles and Le Pavillon du synthétiseur ; Jean-Paul Mousseau’s Le Crash discotheque; Se

They are more interesting for making explicit something that has been implicit in a number of shows over the last while, namely a general ambivalence about the destruction of the world. This is not the sort of thing that seems to be curatorially admitted, even if it is logically implied in many of the works included in such shows. Dante Guthrie , Lindsay Lion Lord , William Mora , Andrew Rutherdale , and Cléo Sjölander are the artists showing under the banner of Annihilation at Galerie Laroche/Joncas . Sparely placed around the room, the show is dominated by the work of Rutherdale, who presents various insect reliquaries and some Chapmanesque gag about the Enlightenment. There is a hodgepodge of over-ornamentation that suggests the Spanish Baroque recast in more decorative than religious form. These are nicely complemented by the sculptures in stoneware and clay by Mora, which have the quality of dilapidated outsider art rescued from an abandoned farmhouse. Framed in explicitly the

The works that make up Christian Messier ’s Symphonie en brun Van Dyck at Masion de la culture Janine-Sutto first showed at L'Œil de poisson in Québec City earlier in the year. Organized as a series of diptychs, it pairs his paintings with his musical compositions. Using a QR code, visitors can listen to the music paired with each painting on their phones. The paintings in oil and the music on synthesizer are intended to “share a common system that creates a tension between the characteristics that unite them and the properties that make them unique.” Effectively, what Messier presents is a kind of visual album, both in the sense of a musical album and a loose album of prints. In a way, they can be experienced like this on his website. The contrast feels a little like what was often displayed in the Italian exploitation films of the 70s, where a lush and haunting score (by Ennio Morricone or Riz Ortolani) was superimposed on scenes of torture, rape, and cannibalism, all usual