Art in Montreal

Just by happenstance (presumably), there were three shows more or less side-by-side dealing with the same basic thematic. At Arprim, Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc’s Les ruines enfouies sont repérables par quelques détours archéologiques , and over at Circa, the paired exhibitions De l’écran à la pierre by Andrée-Anne Carrier and Une trace ineffaçable n’est pas une trace from Chloë Charce. All deal broadly with notions of archaeology, fossilization, and visual illusion. To start with Leduc, there are obvious (deliberate or not) nods to cubist collage and to the reliefs of Arp, but, as it says in the accompanying text, the show is more concerned with cataloguing recent design fads.

  These two exhibitions at Occurrence are both architecture-heavy. It is an interesting juxtaposition with each set suggesting something quite different, not necessarily complementary. Noémie Weinstein, Solariums A set of paintings, they are controlled exercises in clashing modes of abstraction knit together through a clear set of intersecting parts that each offer a different mode of painterly articulation. Based on found and personal source material, these images are readily legible as solariums and other spaces where wet and light intersect, rich in patterning. Instantly, deliberate or not, in terms of imagery and colour scheme, Weinstein’s warm-cool graded paintings are reminiscent of the aesthetics associated with vaporwave and comparable slightly melancholy nostalgia nods to the 1980s. Thematically, Weinstein’s suite of images deals with the threshold where interior and exterior meet. This is done in a lot of very blatant ways. Almost everything in her figurative selection