Reviews: Louis-Philippe Côté at Simon Blais; Angie Quick at Ellephant; Xénia Lucie Laffely and Preston Pavlis at Bradley|Ertaskiran
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 media finally foregrounds, and tends to make overtly central, the luminous field of the medium itself as the space of possibility and undecidability.
A few years ago at least, Côté was interested in a certain level of detachment which he associated with Eastern thought, a detachment above all from the political paranoia and existential panic that seemed to suffuse a lot of his work. If his work has always been concerned with extremes -- expressed generally in a collision of different sets of found images, whether old current -- the anxiety from the past seems to have been displaced.
The fuzziness that was present in the blurring of possible eruptions in reality has turned into something else. Instead of the kind of “schizoid” quality he seemed to be seeking out, it softened into something more along the lines of perversity. There is, perhaps, a rather different sense of tactility to much of the newer work. In his patching together of things, this seems to be the most present. It is not so much a disjunctive synthesis any more than a kind caressing into being, not a tense way of plugging into disparate streams so much as melting them together.
At Ellephant are a series of pieces by Angie Quick. Shown under the title, my horniness is the only thing keeping me alive, most of the paintings, executed between 2018 and 2023, are relatively large, particularly within the cramped confines of the gallery. The cluttered showroom atmosphere that this provides is a bit of a distraction from the works.
In general, they operate along basic Rococo-type spatial language, something that makes them immediately familiar. There are topical details here and there (like cellphones on sticks) but the paintings tend to concentrate on a loose, fantastical type of erotic fantasy, one that is heavily filtered by artistic cliché to the point that the colouring in the ground sometimes suggests 80s school portrait backdrops. Titles range from those suggesting romance novels to the more overtly jokey.
Brush strokes are thick and fat; there is an overall tactile quality of drunken memories, alluded to in the works by the occasional wine bottle. The paint is flat. In its sensual attitude, it comes off as broadly summarized recollection. The ground is a smudged reworking of what look like barely recalled slide projections. The carnal scenes that sprawl across the centre of the paintings are suggestive of orgies that are likewise only recalled through a haze of dampened details. Cartoonishly rendered breasts, tongues, and penises are sporadically apparent but the blurring of bodies into dense masses of flesh that resemble melted candy.
This brings us to the two shows at Bradley|Ertaskiran. They provide quite different approaches to the incorporation of fabric and aspects of quilting as they are integrated into painting.
Xénia Lucie Laffely’s Sea, sin & sun in the bunker area are vivid in the hybridizations.
Laffely’s artistic process begins by digitally patching together photos from personal and pop culture sources, blending certain elements, with the help of Photoshop’s new AI-enhancement feature no less, into delightfully skewed results. The images are then printed onto a silky fabric and collaged anew with textiles, then accentuated with intricate embroidery, protruding patches, and sometimes metal, chains, or jewels.
Some of the pieces are suspended on the wall but a few are leaned against blocks and on image-carpets. Bodies, energy drinks, and the remnants of waterside parties caked in silvery remainders are their representational contents. In imagery they are overtly crude in their “redneck hipster” imagery but embrace it in a way that does not come off either as sentimental or as sneering.
If, in their tactile aspects, they suggest singing wall fish and their assorted accoutrements, they also convey a fair amount of care. The stitching is sometimes elaborate, often stressing an aspect of the image while complicating it with its lines, intensifying detail while throwing how it is being articulated into question.You can argue that they are essentially soft sculptures.
In the main gallery space is Preston Pavlis’ Surrender, which consists of double-sided works in varying sizes. On one side are paintings, often in a portrait form, and on the other are textile works, the stitching from one showing through to the other.
Contemporary artists have long revitalized traditional craft practices and Pavlis draws on a legacy of quilting — rooted in making and bonding, in skin-to-skin contact. Pieces of found leather, velvet, denim, and quotidian fabrics are laboriously taken apart, transformed, and then pieced back together into something new. Pavlis’ choice of materials is purposeful and poignant; these clothes were once used and worn, a part of someone’s daily life, maybe loved but then discarded, swathing one body and now remade by another. This care is a testament to the artist’s ongoing commitment to translating human connection—desire, beauty, sorrow, longing—into moving, tangible means.
Notably, the stitching in Pavlis’ work is much broader and cruder, apparently performatively “human” or pathos-laden whereas in Laffely it possessed a comic and machined quality that was far more de-sentimentalizing. In general, Pavils’ work comes off much more as an adaptation of a series of pre-established folk art models that have simply been redeployed. In some instances this is effective. A few of the paintings are impressive in the evocation of mood, the blocky strokes that make up their figures striking at a distance and crumbling up close.
It is the far more uneven of the two shows. A few of the paintings are good, a few of the “quilts” are good, although the relationship between the two sides generally seems more haphazard than anything. A handful of the works on display are also quite bad. It would have worked more effectively in a smaller space without the flat light and ambience of white walls.
In both cases, what is of primary interest is the sculptural quality that they gain in this engagement with textiles, becoming not just suspended images but objects that can be moved around. In the process, they also stress the “back” of the image and cleverly exploit this for thematic ends that are quite distinct.
In the case of Laffely, the revealed underbelly of the image is a mechanical elegance that adds an abstract layer of real analytical depth to the work. In Pavlis, far from being "poignant," what comes across is the severe superficiality of the engagement with the material and the processes at hand. In his work, it is all about faces floating above a concrete but vague sensuality, but in her pieces, it is all body and thing.