Art in Montreal

Fruit bowls, dolls and their dismembered limbs, stickers, and what look like renderings of film stills are what make up the minimal contents of Alexis Lavoie ’s latest show at Simon Blais . Childhood imagery has long been part of his work. This used to be theatricalized in a deliberate way, working on larger canvases with architectural settings. There were also clear and consistent nods to Francis Bacon and to media events like Abu Ghraib, all slit in amid the birthday decorations for a kid’s party. These paintings (selected from work made between 2019-2022) don’t have that scope of content. Lavoie’s latest oils follow the direction to greater minimalism that he seems to have been going in over his past few shows. This is true in terms of his treatment of surfaces, his range of referents, and his use of scale. The imagery primarily consists of doll limbs, fruit, and bowls. There is a studied sense of painting plastic while flattening the plasticity of the paint application as much