Art in Montreal

  This week it is several different shows from Pictura . Louis-Philippe Côté ’s La chambre aux miroirs at Simon Blais consists of two quite different bodies of work. This is a strategy that seems to be in keeping with his general practice over the past few years. To one side are these hazy, warm-toned canvases that seem packed with art historical allusions and are loosely divided in patterns that suggest frames within frames. As such, they tend to suggest a form of analyzing the image, dissecting it, but in a way that does not clarify its constitutive aspects but blurs them.  To the other side are a series of collage/abstract paintings. A warm, flat colour falls in the background upon which a more pastel ground is built. Squares are set at each extreme of the canvas and images are added. This kind of visual combination, quite common among painters within the city in the late 1960s and early 70s, seems imbued with a different quality by Côté, within which this encounter between medi

In past articles, I have revisited some of the polemics for and against Contemporary Art in the city. This was done both by describing two of its key early events - Québec ‘75 and Aurora Borealis - as well as by looking at one of the first attacks on its development and one of the primary defenses of it. All of this could be contextualized within the generally uncertain historical aftermath of Refus global and the “revolutions” of the 1960s, as a state-supported art system and artificial economy were erected. In line with those sketches, this article looks at a polemical text from the turn of the millennium that provides a kind of halfway checkpoint between this earlier era and where we are now: artist Marcel Deschênes , L'art de qui?: analyse et description chiffrées de ce qui nous tient lieu de marché de l'art (2003). But first, I will start with an anecdote. There was a mild furor created (deliberately) in La Presse during November of 1991 when Jean-Claude Lebl