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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 level of dynamism in presentation that allows for a lucid collective image to be suggested.
Sitting at approximately the centre of the space are a few works by Carl Trahan, on the wall a bar with text running down, flirting with memories of minimalism. In general, his work is stark and condensed. His pieces tend to operate like terse aphorisms about modernist history cast in cold and typically black and white tones. There’s a general sense of morbidity reaching the point of cosmic collapse, all bound to a kind of history-writing, as though the works were pithy and pessimistic footnotes to a larger text. Across from the bar are two flat works set on plinths, swirling texts in numerous languages spiralling across the surface and describing fragmentation. This serves as a kind of legend for the show that can be read spinning out from it to the walls.
The obvious central weight of the show is the bulbous head by Anahita Norouzi that faces the viewer the moment they enter the gallery. Made with clay and 3D printing, it dramatically shifts on inspection, changing from what appears to be a doll’s head on a set to a mass of fake rock formation. When moving around it, its weight takes on the dimension of a crude joke, its kitsch colouring and “gravity” only accentuated by the far cruder way that the eyes have been rendered, the clumsy application of paint, and the cold and limpidly mechanized quality of the pool of “tears” that have accumulated to the side. If the solidity is stressed so is its fragmentary quality, and this is what a lot of the other works take up.
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Besides the fragmentary aspect that these just mentioned works share and put on display by rather different means, the logic of the rest of the show seems to follow a similar suit. It is not merely the play between extremes of colour and texture that help to create a rhythm to the exhibition that shows in the former space tended to lack, but changes in scale and variations in how the works are set in height.
Thematically, continuity can be drawn between David Elliott’s small and sentimental collage-diorama and the fragmentary accumulations of hues and texture into a hazy relief in James Gardner's piece, providing two distinct approaches to this general sense of fragmentation and accumulation. Such a theme is played out differently yet again with Tristram Lansdowne’s work, which pools a cool nostalgia with precise framing and delineation that stresses flattened coherency over their sentimental (if slightly estranged) tactility.
If the sorts of colour and “vibe” that Lansdowne uses can also be seen echoing in work by Maude Corriveau, the reduction of figuration for an equally nostalgic kind of formalism is evident in Jérôme Nadeau and Malcolm McCormick. Nadeau’s work is a nice complement to Trahan’s providing a very different sort of seemingly stark minimalism that veers closer to the sardonic side of Brutalism. McCormick’s work is more in the vein of where kitsch and abstraction meet with his cut-together canvas and chromatic hovering around the vague degree of facialization.
Other work ebbs closer to full-on kitsch. One of Devon Pryce’s better depictions of excessively large-handed morose guys is present, the weight of its components balanced for coherency. Lorna Bauer is represented by a lush and dark maternal photo and various glass vessels meant to suggest breath and, by context, nipples (real or prosthetic). If the former is effective, the latter seems too forced in its minimization, resulting in the limited pigmentation and framing cage coming off as over the top.
Meanwhile, Simon Petepiece’s use of architectural materials and allusions to the history of ornament is a nice bridge between the starkness of Nadeau and Trahan and the fragmentary but ornate element that pops up in a lot of the other work. On the whole, there is a polished decay quality to much of the show.
An industrial-type curtain blocks the gallery’s entrance while offering a blurred view of Lucie Rocher’s installation, which invites us on both sides of the artist’s nearly decade-long research process. Marking a moment in time, a milestone, the curtain also materializes the anticipation of a future experience, like an artist at the early stage of a project, a residency, or even a career. [p] The installation that follows offers a kaleidoscopic view of the parallel development of Rocher as an artist and the De Gaspé complex as an important artistic hub.
Rocher’s work has been mining the labour fetish for years, presenting stark and sterilized sets of building materials that stress their superimposition of frames as skeletons of utilitarian possibility in relatively elegantly composed scenarios (such as Faits et causes [2017]). She even used the curtain gimmick previously (albeit to a more clearly theatrical effect) in her Résidence au Palais des Paris in Takasaki (2018).
The curtain functions as a filter, a chromatic device that provides a level of distortion, linearization, and a way to make evident the act of picturing that the viewer has to undertake. In this, it is an extension of the various processes (solarization, etc.) that she relies upon to make the plates that she sets at angles to the wall, a gesture that gives them an interesting sculptural quality.
But more than typical with her exhibitions, which tend to have a theatrical quality that seems designed mostly to be photographed and salvaged as a memorial to construction, the overwhelming suggestion here is a sentimentalizing infantilization. Make what you will of what that suggests about the growth of the “De Gaspé complex as an important artistic hub.”