But the logic of the works suggests something more complicated than this fairly bland and platitudinous idea of the destruction of nature, of extractionism, or the critique of the landscape genre as a site of the industrial gaze and its bad conscience (tourism). In plastic terms, most of the work undermines these kinds of readings.
For such readings to work, you have to imagine a basic homogeneity that is being disrupted (violated) by the heterogeneous. Nature stands in for the homogeneous and the various mutilations and sculpting of the canvas, as zones of heterogeneity, operate as the artificial. This “violence” is art, whether that is painting itself or its referent (pollution, environmental despoilation, tourism). This seems to be what the work dramatizes, leaving gashes and holes in the canvas. However, it is also what it blurs and undermines. This has another result.
Holes and tears function as frames, as visual devices. Two things that come from this are (1) the appearance of armatures of the work (its frame and the wall on which it is suspended) and (2) the creation of a miniature shadow theatre. The latter occurs in several works where the canvas is suspended on its side, a small figure carved and erected out of its surface, leaving the outline of their figure as a hole in the canvas. Light passes through this and a shadow effect is created where the figure is light perforating the shade projected by the canvas. Due to the static lighting of the gallery, this is a kind of frozen frame animation, only slightly moving thanks to tangential movement in the space.
Lamontagne has explicitly linked his work to that of Magritte, for instance in the 2007 exhibition train de memoire at the same gallery. This both stresses the theme of illusionism and that the primary referent is the mechanics of art. The framing texts for the current exhibition stress the trompe-l’oeil aspects of his work and his treatment of the painting in almost sculptural terms.
In cage aux îles, the artist methodically cuts out neat little squares from an otherwise picturesque seascape of a quaint fishing town. He then neatly rolls the canvas tightly into itself and paints them as cigarette butts. Segments of canvas that are necessary to complete the scene’s vista are removed, insinuating both absence and destruction. The trompe-l’oeil cigarettes – some lit, others bent, and others only half smoked – litter not just the ground, but the entirety of the scene.
But Lamontagne’s work is not really about trompe-l’oeil at all. It is all about demonstration, about making the medium evident. This does not so much dispel illusion as it makes its construction visible, something which creates additional illusions as much or more than it illuminates them. In a way, the stress on their sculptural aspects suggests, whether it is really felt or not, a dread of the illusion being believed.
This all fits with the general gag quality of the work. The gags, like their implications, seem rather obvious. They do not require much unravelling, which is perhaps why the bits that do not quite fit stand out more. This minimalistic aspect does not invite lengthy durational engagement and also tends to provide an ironic comment on one of the themes introduced, namely contemplation.
By dint of the floorplan where the exhibition is spread out, there is one area, I will call it an alcove since that is what it approximates, that is left “empty,” a mock police tape running across it with “Contemplation” scribed across it where Danger, Caution, or Police Line Do Not Cross might have been. It suggests a mockery (not in the sense of derision so much as something like mock chicken) of things like Walter De Maria’s series of earth rooms from the 70s but it also summarizes the basic conceptual tension at play in most of the work.
Insofar as they are making some kind of polemical comment, the works, in effect (if not necessarily by intention), seem much more like a send-up of ecologism than anything else. They suggest, simultaneously, that there is a nature that can be violated by human intervention (art), but also that the fantasy of nature as something to be considered separable from human activity is clearly a vapid notion; the idea that there is something that can be violated is an illusion (a shadow). So, in the end, it is not about illusion in the sense of the artificial illusions of trompe-l’oeil, but in the conceptual illusion of violence.
* 1st photo from gallery site, 2nd my own.