Art in Montreal

The mayonnaise doesn’t take, all these beautiful people are just getting together to ape a culture, to pretend. We live, without suspecting it I suppose, in a simulation of culture, fundamentally unreal - the illusion is total, but we only have the empty appearance of things, never the reality. Laurent-Michel Vacher, Dialogues en ruine (1996) In Trou de mémoire (1968), Hubert Aquin has one of his characters write, “Québec is a poor troop of stuttering players afflicted with amnesia, who stare at each other with questioning looks.” This could be a description of the province’s Contemporary Art. It certainly seems like an apt description of how it was talked about by its apologists during the days of the doomed Triennales. Doom and horror tend to hover around a fair amount of the city’s Contemporary Art. It is usually marketed less crudely than this would suggest. Certainly, you could make a reasonable case for the rise of horror aesthetics and thematism in Contemporary Art, both ...

  The group show Radar at Galerie Hughes Charbonneau does not have much unity. It is figurative and not; it contains painting, drawing, sculpture, etc. There is some extremely loose representational concern, but resonance between the works is hardly laboured, even though some can be detected. It is also uneven, so I will focus on the better work. Marie Danielle Duval is back with more of the same of what she has shown there and elsewhere. She continues her obsessive attention to pattern and the melding of the figure to décor. The fusion of figure and detail comes through more here than before and the heads of her figures continue to have a floating quality, as though she can’t commit to a full-on mimetism between figure and ground. These themes are coincidentally suggested in titles for Kimberly Orjuela ’s sculptures, which are a mixture of figures and objects, with the former far superior to the latter. The two stand-outs in the show are the pieces by Karam Arteen and Mallora...

Hannaleah Ledwell's Pour ceux qui mangeait des fleurs at Galerie du Viaduc Hannaleah Ledwell ’s pieces displayed at Galerie du Viaduc seem to continue what she was doing in the last two exhibitions of hers that I have seen (at Popup and Gallery Parfois). But there have also been some significant shifts. Specifically, her palette has altered. It is darker, bluer, more night scene but still in the pastoral vein that she seems to cultivate. The rendering of the bodies is clearer and cartoonishly overlaid to make the gestures more legible while less concrete. The figures are more readable, their distinction from the ground is starker than before. This is also helped by the greater expansion in palette. One of the more interesting things in the show is the inclusion of what appear to be several small mock-ups for paintings that dot across one back wall. It might have been interesting to integrate this aspect more into the display of the more fully worked-out pieces. It will be intere...