Review: Reverb at Art Mûr

Curated by Trevor Kiernander and featuring artists from several countries, Reverb is part of the second edition of the Pictura Triennale (we looked at a very different exhibition from it last week). The event’s organizers define it as:

a project that has been in constant development with the specific intention of collectively presenting the various formal, critical, and political positions of Montreal painting to a wider audience, with the aim of bringing international attention to Montreal, which is probably one of the central cities for painting in Canada.

The works selected by Kiernander are on display at Art Mûr and form a miniature survey of trends that he has encountered over the past several years and which he frames in reference to the difficulties posed to painting in the post-internet era. Artists selected are Colin Canary, Beth Frey, Ian Gonczarow, Anaïs Goupy, Karine Guyon, Claudia Kleiner, Lauren Pelc McArthur, John Drew Munro, Ianick Raymond, and Megan Wade-Darragh. The pieces are not strictly wall paintings and branch into the more sculptural and animated.

This show is almost all in the vein of meta-painting, with a concern for what painting can do. As with so much else that has been percolating in galleries, there is an oldness to it. It is powdery, as perfume aficionados might call it, and which provides it with a hanging note of familiarity. Some of it is expressive, some of it is more analytical, and some of it is more atmospheric. 

Much of the work is about a certain fleshiness, a suggestion of the tactility of the medium and its mediation of imagery. This is the most obvious in Raymond’s paint skins, some of which showed at Arprim as OOPArt a few years ago, and which stress the sculptural possibility of paint, presenting it as a raked surface for adhesion left naked for optical illusion. Placed on the wall like smears, they resemble plasticine with the occasional surprise moire pattern suggested.

While visual art is inevitably going to deal with perception, the transformation of its surfaces into spectacles of texture and tonal articulation is less necessarily the case. And it is the ratcheting up of their aspects to this point that serves as the basic point for a lot of the work. They each do this in distinct ways.

Goupy’s acrylic and inkjet print work is some of the most overtly figurative, relying on references to pop figures (Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian). They ride the line where caricature and abstraction collide. In the most successful of the three works displayed (Kim, 2022), these things visually congeal into what resembles the body-landscape type of magic realist imagery that has been common since surrealism, here offered up in cool tones and enrobed in claims that it is about data analysis.

Frey’s work follows a similar trajectory in a different direction. Relying on more cartooning of the figures, they have a collaged quality that hints at (though never embraces) the breakdown of clear articulation between figure and ground into chunky portions. This reaches its strongest point in The Myth of the Magical Toothbrush (2022). The aspects are not assimilated but placed so that they retain a generalized hint of flatness softened up by the scattered palette. And this quality is what comes out more explicitly in the video/animation that is included.

The oil and acrylic works by Gonczarow can be readily situated in the loose realm of “post-internet” painting with its superimposition of different styles of imagery posing flatly against each other in an artificial screen saver-space. If there was a performatively childish quality in Frey, this is pushed even further in Gonczarow, where it seems less dreamy and more like a nostalgia-tinged game.

Canary’s work comes off as anecdotal. The pieces seem like memorials for the ephemeral. Integrating photography in a repetitious and layered fashion, they are reminiscent of Pop in their segmentation and limited colouration. The stuttered moment that they articulate is given a more hyperbolic quality in the sculptural works. Here, the image of the flower is suspended on a drooping stem that approaches kitsch in its sentimentality.

Guyon’s works constructed out of oil, beeswax, pigment, and glitter on canvas and wood have a brittle quality. The crude grids that map out their surfaces, once more like the games of Gonczarow, possess a suggestive quality at a distance, with loose patterns and shapes intimated amid the bedlam of their lines. This dissipates on closer inspection and their density and ribbing gives them a gummy, sculptural quality. The glittery circles that sit at their heads suggest the more kitsch moves in Lucio Fontana.

Using collage and acrylic paint on both sides of mylar, Munro exploits the visual language associated with some of the more sober models of formalism, but in using the kind of filmy surface stresses its deceptive powers for illusion.

Kleiner and Raymond’s work is pulpy in the double sense of appearing as a separated material and possessing a temporally distant, melodramatic tone. In their stripped-down quality, what registers most is the excessiveness of it. They appear as the residual presencing of paint, as the point where minimization paradoxically becomes too much.

The work of Wade-Darragh seems constructed out of found imagery. Sometimes this imagery is appropriated on its own and sometimes it is taken as part of a broader cutting out of a context in which it would appear. It is not so much re-mediated as reconstituted from its environment, and in this sense, they resemble a peculiar still-life painting where it is not simply a matter of media but of media’s banality in the invisible architecture within which it appears. 

The use of media imagery does not function simply as source material or as object but tends to be mimed in ways that suggest the decay of media. As such, a painting like CMYK (2022) is a depiction of decomposition.

In his exhibition text, Kiernander states that:

The first inspiration for Reverb, before I had even conceived of this show, came from the work of Lauren Pelc-McArthur. Her paintings are built through layering paint, combining flat, opaque surfaces with elevated, mock-iridescent areas, with sections of colour subtly shifting depending on the viewing angle, and in turn cannot be photographed accurately, combatting the abundance of ‘screen friendly’ painting, thereby taking control of her viewer. Pelc-McArthur’s overarching aim is to evoke a sensation on par with compulsively scrolling through train-wrecks while experiencing an optical migraine.

To extend the biological metaphors, there is a plaque quality to the way that much of the work articulates the functionality of perception.

The overarching curatorial aim is the insistence on the material presence of painting, on its affective or sensual value as an object more than image, as a device in its own right rather than simply the potential “content” for another media form. In this respect, it varies little from what have been standard lines regarding the “crisis” in painting since the early 1960s. And in strategies they are equally familiar, stressing either a deceptive minimalism or maximalism of gesture that puts the accent on the durational engagement with a painting as it assimilates and transforms the textures of other media by mimetism.

The general tendency is to treat perception as the frame of decomposition. Painting as a form of externalization takes on the role of the artificer of the eternal, a re-enactment of the role it took on in the 19th century as it vied with high academicism and photography. There is nothing of the startling quality that was said to erupt at that time. The “combatting the abundance of ‘screen friendly’ painting,” seems to be more about a kind of re-enchantment of painting, an allure of tactility whose dumbness may seem profound. The combining of strategies is not in itself enough to be analytical and often comes off more like special effects or filtering, the performance of an app. If these dangers are present, painting nonetheless retains its almost perpetual sense of irony as the threat of the non-ephemeral, as that strange persistence that undermines the common sense of the present.