Review: Peinture fraîche et nouvelle construction – 20e édition at Art Mûr

Arriving during the summer slump (festival season) for galleries is the 20th edition of Art Mûr’s annual survey of the work of (primarily) grad students from MFA programmes across the country. And it is interesting again because the survey form and its absence of supplementation largely removes any clear intentionality and whatever “meaning” there seems to be comes largely from coincidences of display. Aside from checking if they had websites, I have made no effort to discern the significance of the works involved beyond how they appear in this context.

The exhibition Fresh Paint and New Construction, a not-to-be-missed annual event, celebrates its 20th edition this year. As every July at Art Mûr gallery, the works of students from twelve Canadian universities are brought together in a collective exhibition, offering a captivating immersion into new artistic approaches. This edition is no exception, with a selection of works highlighting the innovation and creativity of the next generation of professional artists. The themes and issues addressed through the artworks make this collective exhibition a powerful testament to the quality and relevance of emerging artistic practices.

2022 was dominated by kitsch and 2023 was all over the place, but this year seems a lot more measured and consistent. The first floor, in particular, could stand alone as a group show. There is an impressive flow from one work to the next that helps to clarify their techniques and strategies. The other two floors are a little more heterogeneous, seemingly organized more in terms of tone and colour than anything else. They also break down more into small sets of works by specific artists instead of organically intermingling. 

At the entrance way of the first floor, you encounter the blunt, flat, veristic paintings of Mathieu Hénault. They depict the working spaces of artists, the lockers, curtains, frames and work tables of studios. Smooth, sometimes unfinished, and without much texture (in paint or image), they have the liveliness of fluorescent light and stress the linearity of their spaces in ways that clearly make the breakdown of the frame into a set of frames evident. This provides a key for the first section of the show. Marina Diolaiti’s steel sculpture backs this up, reducing these patterns into abstraction and solidifying them. Painting similar forms, the work of Lailey Newton combines such compositions with those of digital modeling, which are then painted out as a kind of mechanized fantasy of architectural space, re-abstracting the abstraction and returning it to a verist depiction of an art tool.

 The translation between different media is also accented in Max St-Pierre’s wool renderings of computer graphics or Zoe Adams’ ceramic rendering of crocs. Most of the rest of the work on this floor follows similar patterns, weaving together digital mediation and its recasting in terms of sculptures, textiles, and prints. The first floor basically runs you from spare verist treatments of basic art tools to post-digital kitsch, such as the game card-style paintings of Silas Wamsley. It is very succinct.

By the second floor, things are more sprawling. Cut into two distinct spaces, the works tend to break down into sets. Overall, a prop quality dominates most of it and the display context makes it feel like stuff in a warehouse. The theatricality gets somewhat short-circuited by the context of a survey show that clusters everything together in this fashion. Likely the best example of this is Sapphire Moroz, whose works involve painting, furnishings, drapery and so on. They are pieces about intimacy and privacy and the site of these things, whether that is a truncated bed or the play of reflections in a splintered mirror and the invitation to interact with the freezing of its mechanics. Almost cloistered in the corner here, they seem to lack the breathing space they possessed in other installations. Part of this is because the works that Moroz is paired with and the dark painting that surrounds them forces a grimmer ambience than may be good for them. Sabrina Schmidt’s angsty paintings with dark interiors and blear figures are medicated depression horror bits. Even Mackenzie Anderson’s bark carved with homilies in rustic family décor mode come off as creepy within this display context. Jane Rochette’s awkwardly sized bed and fabrics covered in what seems to be unreadable text also add to the generally creepy, melodramatic atmosphere that is created.

The rest of the second floor is very different with its flat white space and filed pieces. Grete Drummond shows a series of uniformly sized paintings, most tightly composed but softened by tone and loose application. Beside her, Gloria Pépin-Schippers presents atypically shaped paintings of figures whose cropping moves them away from portraiture into a paradoxical strangeness of banal detail and dislocated sentimentality. Sam Morgan’s pieces have an even more seemingly close-cropped rough and ready verism this time with an accent on the design aspect of the vehicles depicted (the choice of narrowing in highlights this) and added graphism (graffiti, logos) anecdotal, slightly humorous. Rose de la Riva, one of the other sets of pieces with some humour to it, offering spare works that feel like gags. Alex Pouliot’s various cracked mirror pieces fall somewhere between seeming like discarded props and being impressively simple forms of visual machinery that provide a concise kind of optical effect. With the exception of these last two artists, most of the work likely benefits from this form of display.

The third floor is more consistently garish and grotesque, both in terms of colouring and content. Carmen Mahave has several comic-repellant pieces cast in silicone and baring human hair that resemble giant, naked rodents. This also offers a work that relies heavily on mirrors that might have been interesting paired with those of Pouliot and Moroz. Claire McNamara’s pleasantly softened and moderately kitschy painting of a fluffy puppy or the metallic warmed-over feminist kitsch of Chloé Larivière's steel and copper genitalia in a way that seems unintentionally revealing. Then there’s a lot of gaudy acrylic painting which is mostly bad in ways that aren’t actually interesting.