Art in Montreal

Après moi le déluge is Oli Sorenson ’s new show at Art Mûr . Christine Blais’ gallery text frames the theme of the exhibition this way: The phrase coined by Louis XV at the end of his reign, indifferent to the consequences of his extravagant actions, then taken up by Karl Marx to stigmatize the bourgeoisie of his day, ‘Après moi le déluge’ (After me the flood) is used today to highlight the tensions of individual profit on populations and nature, on the precipice of ecological catastrophe. In PR materials, Sorenson tends to cite “remix culture” as an influence, one evidenced the most obviously in his re-tooling of Hollywood films and posters, but also present here in the plucking of work from various series shown elsewhere. The work at Art Mûr mostly seems to come from The Zombie Capitalism series, which itself is an extension of the Anthropocene (2021) and Capitalocene (2022) projects.  Spread over half of the second floor, the exhibition is a mixture of large and small pieces.

Occupying the top floor of Art Mûr, Éric Lamontagne’s La nature des choses muettes offers a selection of painted works. These are variations on the landscape genre. The spaces are presented, usually in a vertical format that suggests portraiture more than traditional landscape painting. Rather than suggesting the sublime, they tend toward the satiric, their images punctuated in an overtly literal way with butterflies cut out and extracted or discarded cigarettes and toilet paper seemingly rolled from the face of nature, leaving absences behind. Sometimes we can see that the image of nature has been rendered in ways that suggest digital pixelation and, in a few instances, the canvas is a wreck, either ruined by “nature” or dramatically embodying its destruction. The accompanying text spells out this reading as, “Here, the artist interjects into the landscape in a similar destructive manner that we as humans have intervened into the natural world.” But the logic of the works suggests

Curated by Trevor Kiernander and featuring artists from several countries, Reverb is part of the second edition of the Pictura Triennale (we looked at a very different exhibition from it last week). The event’s organizers define it as : a project that has been in constant development with the specific intention of collectively presenting the various formal, critical, and political positions of Montreal painting to a wider audience, with the aim of bringing international attention to Montreal, which is probably one of the central cities for painting in Canada. The works selected by Kiernander are on display at Art Mûr and form a miniature survey of trends that he has encountered over the past several years and which he frames in reference to the difficulties posed to painting in the post-internet era. Artists selected are Colin Canary, Beth Frey, Ian Gonczarow, Anaïs Goupy, Karine Guyon, Claudia Kleiner, Lauren Pelc McArthur, John Drew Munro, Ianick Raymond, and Megan Wade-Darrag

Last week’s reviews touched on the “poetic” attempt to do what amounts to pseudo-investigative journalism, avoiding the tabloid route by exploiting an arguably brassy form of performative religiosity to market its slim content. This was given an unsurprising phenomenological inflection (the links between phenomenology and the return to a vaguer and more “embodied” religiosity are well-known) through an appeal to attunement. Attunement, as Heidegger once pointed out, tends to go along with boredom, even when it is about looking at shoes. The conflict between boredom and attunement was avoided in the discussion last week and it will not get much play this time either. But there are a handful more incidents of poetic tuning in and out on display.  Something like this was at play in Patrick Beaulieu ’s Transvasements at Art Mûr. The work was created through his interaction with the various landscapes he passed through while aboard a tiny vessel as it “sailed from the Gironde estuary to

Extrapolations at Art Mûr brings together some of the latest work of Guillaume Lachapelle . It is a mix of the general tendencies in his practice. There are miniatures on the wall -- often resembling humans attached to architectural and technological elements -- and there is the gadgetry of his diorama that play on ghostly optical illusions. There are also some “skeletal” remains of vague creatures hung up like trophies.  Much of the sculptural work in this exhibition was created utilizing photogrammetry, a process with uses photos taken at different angles to their object to construct 3D print-outs. Distortion with the figures suggests digital glitching in the process with the occasional monstrous result.  Over the more than fifteen years that he has been showing, critics have highlighted the supposedly “childlike nature” of works featuring “fantastic” creatures in unlikely scenarios. Or they have stressed a duality in his work between its apparent realism and evident fantasy.

  What follows is a review of three different exhibitions. They are presented here because they have significant thematic/conceptual overlap and demonstrate different strategies of approach in a wide variety of media. Although the first and second approach the spectre of colonialism loosely, the last exploits it as its central feature. Mathieu Gotti’s La grande Liquidation tout doit disparaître at Art Mûr This is a repackaging of much the same work by Mathieu Gotti that was shown at the Centre d’art Jacques et Michel Auger in Victoriaville in 2021, although the scaling here is more confined. It involves a set of painted wood carvings, primarily of animals, but also of weaponry, gas cans etc. Carving marks are prominent and the paint application is crude if never garish. In general, they have the sense of inflated toys. Spread around the front of the gallery, they also give the impression of being more accumulated like a snow drift than thoughtfully placed. If they are toyish, t

La multitude déchue is a show of drawings, photos, and little sculptures by Peter Gnass at Art Mûr . The majority of them are dated 2009-2011 and were previously shown at Maison de la Culture Côte-des-Neiges in 2016. Suggestive enough to be topical, they aren’t topical enough to suggest much. If it isn’t quite as visually crude as Félipe Goulet Letarte , conceptually, it seems even weaker. While the former was so (unintentionally?) ambiguous that it became paradoxical and farcical, Gnass is much more puritanical and dull.

  Clint Neufeld ’s All hat No cattle at Art Mûr contains pieces of glassware, serving plates and furniture in various vague period styles that roughly suggest the late 18th and early 19th centuries. On them, whether resting on pillows or seemingly growing from or embracing them, are various industrial implements. The ways his work has been talked about have been rather boring and predictable, seeing in it some sort of statement about gender or defamiliarization . An almost identical set of strategies were employed with Cal Lane in the same space just a month ago. Neufeld falls into this sometimes but usually seems to just tell anecdotes about his life. In a way, this is the far better way to approach the works.

  Eddy Firmin 's Orgueil et préjugés spans two substantial rooms at Art Mûr , employing installations of appropriated items, sculptures, video, and photography. Stylistically, these suggest regional museum aesthetics, installation art, advertising, jewellery display cases, video essays and so on. The eclecticism of strategies does not suggest museographic critique so much as artistic egoism, consistently returning to images of the artist. The performative heterogeneity of its material resources ironically only points to the homogeneity of its polemical references and techniques. Together they blur the viability of any kind of point.

Jessica Houston, The Long Haul   Jessica Houston ’s exhibition Over the Edge of the World offers a set of alternative history narratives constructed around polar exploration. It relies upon a set of different material approaches (collage, video, objects, oil painting, and ink), each discretely investigating a different perspective on the space. This includes a feminist alternative history of exploration, surrealist imagery of exploration that takes on a nearly mystical quality, maps, and collages fashioned largely from National Geographic magazine. In this respect, the show makes many of the same rhetorical gestures, and probes some of the same issues as Patrick Bérubé’s more enigmatic and humorous Mother Rock! exhibition in the same space a few months ago (March-April). Spanning two large rooms and broken into half a dozen distinct sections, Houston’s exhibition is sprawling, each aspect adding a different spin to her basic theme. Presumably, the scale is intended to convey

  Peinture fraiche et nouvelle construction 2022 at Art Mûr . For better and worse, kitsch abounds at the latest edition of Art Mûr’s annual showing of work plucked from university programmes across the country. Whether it is a sign of curatorial bias or the homogeneity of current academic art, this year’s exhibition felt much more cohesive than the past few. It was mostly nicely arranged and flowed well. While sculpture in the country may be reaching a new low, if this and the work I have seen from the biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine are any indications, some of the painting is at least likable. I’ll address the sculpture problem at some other date. While the non-representational work consists almost entirely of the uniformly forgettable glittery-blob-deformed-diacritic-with-some-scrawling stuff that has been popping up for years, the figurative work is more interesting. None of it is quite decorative, but it’s pretty close. The more striking thing was how dated (an