Art in Montreal

If the various hazy streams of art in the city finally began to freeze into a more or less reductive vision of what constituted Contemporary Art around the Québec 75 exhibition , this gradual movement was further solidified a decade later with the inauguration of the Cent jours d’art contemporain, and its first exhibition Aurora Borealis , which ran in the summer of 1985. The media declared it “the biggest contemporary art event ever held in Canada, (in the Promenades de la Cité du Parc) [welcoming] some 15,000 visitors (including schools, colleges and universities who have booked a visit in the coming weeks).” [Jocelyne Lepage, “Aurora Borealis: 15 000 visiteurs et bonne presse,” La Presse , September 12, 1985, B1.] This was less than half of the attendance that had been projected, and, the journalist added, significantly less than the two blockbuster shows occurring simultaneous to it, Ramses II (500,000 visitors) and a Picasso show (300,000 visitors). But if it scarcely competed

Steve Giasson’s Andy Warhol at Laroche/Joncas Steve Giasson paints and draws several copies of Warhol works, often filtered through the copies of those works by other artists to the point that they are more depictions of copies. As exercises in representing painting, the works at Laroche/Joncas are exercises in intimacy and affection that are very different from the wrapped works of Tammi Campbell’s On View shown at Blouin|Division recently. Here, the show becomes a demonstration of touching through the reproduction of the image, given new mediation, and reconstituted. Generally of a different scale than the first and its copies, these re-imaginings are not simply invitations to a kind of mental comparison, itself perhaps rife with a kind of nostalgia. The framing justification claims “[h]is committed and tongue-in-cheek practice is based on pre-existing artworks or historical or daily fragments, which he appropriates in different ways, in order to undermine romantic notions

There were three exhibitions focusing on the Torma-Zsako family in the city over the past month or so. One at Robert Poulin ( Métamorphoses ) that featured them heavily, one at Laroche/Joncas ( 1 famille, 4 artistes, 2 expositions ), and this one at Projet Casa ( Flowers, Warriors, Beasts, Hands: Divergences et réciprocité ). Unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of overlap between them. The Poulin and Casa shows were, however, the stronger. The Casa show displayed them at their most uneven and Istvan’s and David ’s sculptures dominated. At Poulin it was Balint ’s watercolours and Anna ’s sewn works that overshadowed the others. The Casa show was very much a sculpture show and the Poulin show was a wall art one.

  Three different shows of mostly painting this week. One of these was quite good while the others were not to widely varying degrees. They are all settled in vague mythological spaces. Both Leong and Jaouich’s shows are afflicted with a hysterical form of reactionary humanism while Daigneault’s is an admirably concise rendering of pessimistic comedy.