Art in Montreal

Last year, we detected a tendency toward literary adaptation in several shows that attempted to stage the literary work as a visual spectacle. This continues in two very different directions in a pair of shows on at the Belgo now. The first follows a loosely illustrative move and the second a more formally complex inter-textual one. They are thematically linked by being ostensibly concerned with identity, both in terms of their source material’s themes and their methodology, which introduces a relation between the material and the artist. This thematic concern tends to be overshadowed by the content of the works on display. According to the curatorial text for Marie-Danielle Duval ’s Emerald Room at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau: The exhibition presents a series of intimate paintings and drawings featuring black female figures inspired by Denver, a fictional character from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. These paintings offer narrative spaces conducive to reflection and repose for th

Occupying the top floor of Art Mûr, Éric Lamontagne’s La nature des choses muettes offers a selection of painted works. These are variations on the landscape genre. The spaces are presented, usually in a vertical format that suggests portraiture more than traditional landscape painting. Rather than suggesting the sublime, they tend toward the satiric, their images punctuated in an overtly literal way with butterflies cut out and extracted or discarded cigarettes and toilet paper seemingly rolled from the face of nature, leaving absences behind. Sometimes we can see that the image of nature has been rendered in ways that suggest digital pixelation and, in a few instances, the canvas is a wreck, either ruined by “nature” or dramatically embodying its destruction. The accompanying text spells out this reading as, “Here, the artist interjects into the landscape in a similar destructive manner that we as humans have intervened into the natural world.” But the logic of the works suggests

In the previous installment of this sketchy exploration of the political economy of Canada’s artworld, I dealt mostly with the specifics of Québec, notably with the corruption that some polemically suggested was central to how its art system functions. Here, I take a boarder view. In the background, more implied than argued here, is that Contemporary Art is a genre, at least if this term is understood in the way it has been employed by film theorists like Rick Altman and Steve Neale, to designate a heterogeneous matrix with consistent furniture, strategies of hybridization, and a clear pattern of industrial production that has to a substantial degree determined its formal qualities. As Altman has claimed, genres are best understood as “contraptions capable of performing multiple tasks” that allow for the general summing up of formula, structure, and expectation, providing a “conduit” for the flow of desires. [Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 14-15] T