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...

  What connects these two shows, and I won’t labour the point, is writing. By coincidence, they fit intriguingly within the trend that seems to be going on with artists attempting to negotiate text in exhibitions. In the case of Didier Morelli , this seems very conscious, especially since it is as much a work of curation and ressentimentalization as anything else. In Louise Robert, text was an essential part of her practice and the attempt to think through its graphic possibilities was central. Hommage à Louise Robert (1941-2022) at Galerie Simon Blais Among the province’s Contemporary artists, Louise Robert has been written about more than most. Self-taught, her early work mimed Automatism until her graphism expanded to include what looks like writing, and sometimes is such, sometimes a title or allusion, sometimes just the appearance of writing. While the place of writing in her work is the perennial issue that is taken up, it is usually in reference to écriture , whether un...