Art in Montreal

Galerie Nicolas Robert has moved to a new spot on Saint-Laurent. Chapitre III: Exposition inaugurale recognizes the latest stage in the gallerist's career and contains the works of more than twenty artists associated with the gallery. The new space is bright and evenly lit. Far larger than the gallery’s former residence on King, with high ceilings and rough floors (in the front anteroom maybe too rough). The more interesting thing about the exhibition is that it works coherently as one despite having no real conceptual framework, and no apparent intention beyond an indexing or autobiography of the gallery. It could be interpreted as a partial catalogue of one person’s taste or at least their sense of the market. I am not going to speculate on either of those things. Part of what makes the exhibition work is a certain degree of thematic complementarity between the works (it is pretty loose), but even more in how the selection of extreme variations in colour and scale create a

The art fair occurred again this year, transpiring in the port last weekend. According to their ad copy : Plural celebrates the best of contemporary art in Canada. Created by and for galleries, the fair brings together and presents the plurality of voices and works in contemporary art from across the country. It elevates art market practices: on the one hand, with a rigorous selection of galleries presenting carefully chosen artists and works; on the other, through accessible programming addressing current themes in the field of the arts. Plural fosters the discovery of new voices and forms of expression in cutting-edge contemporary art, while cultivating a spirit of community within the Canadian arts community. Rather than reviewing that event as I did last year , I attended what could be termed its complement (it was not a rival). Singuliers occurred in the workshop building of Fonderie Darling from April 11th to 14th and runs from the 11th to the 29th at Agrégat (I’m limiting my

  The latest show at Blouin|Division, Le temps passe lentement , features work by Tammi Campbell , An Te Liu , Sarah Stevenson , Simon Hughes , Matthew Feyld , and Daniel Langevin . It is a mixture of sculpture and wall art. While exploiting the appearance of being abstract or non-objective, it is not. With its stress on the similar, on miming and homage, it is closer to drag than it is to Modernism. And it is clearly closer to the sort of Pictures art that was fashionable in the 1980s. It shares a lot more with re-photographing photos than it is like the painting that that it borrows its style and imagery from. That kind of work, which is what I assume the accompanying text is very vaguely referring to as “Post-Modern” with all its “arch ( ironique )” qualities, was also quite different. The work of the 80s played against scale more, had a detachedness to it that concentrated on the ways that the work was being re-mediated and tended to question referentiality. It could be caustic

Having undertaken this iteration of my critical project for nearly two years, I think it is time to clarify a few things about my general position. Reasonably, one might ask what the value of art criticism is. I have known more than one artist who would argue that the role of the critic is irrelevant since Contemporary Art is already self-critical. I would respond that this often mistakes both what art is and what criticism is, for whatever is generally present has little to do with criticism and has more to do with a recycling of terms that are imbibed through either the art press or (typically) badly taught university seminars. Over a few articles, I will speculate on what else criticism might do, something I will attempt largely through the critical evaluation of a series of theoretical texts. But for this, the first instance, I will only make some very general remarks, some of which are quite obvious, and some even stupid, but which will serve to frame a little of the ground for