Art in Montreal

  This review is a trifle long, but the four exhibitions I discuss seem to dovetail quite nicely into one another and, in context, perhaps illuminate some points better than they would if discussed in isolation. What follows is mostly about curation and only secondarily about the artworks themselves. To start with an anecdote: I was touring MFA studios a few years ago (seven or eight, I think) and was told that one student was making art for wildlife, specifically, beavers. I naively assumed this must have meant they were doing wilderness installations intended solely for an animal audience to interact with. That sounded great. Unfortunately, that was just the “concept.” What they were actually doing was making underwhelming mixed-media sculptures that resembled discards from a costume shop if they’d fallen off a truck on the highway and then been stitched together. The work was produced for the typical display spaces and leaning on the discursive norms of Contemporary Art. T...

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 ...