Art in Montreal

* For a change, I have given the poor souls who write exhibition statements a break and not engaged with them. Inés Fernández-Shaw , Objects in the Mirror May Are Closer Than They Appear at Duran Contemporain The gallery walls are dotted with a baker’s dozen of paintings. The imagery mostly involves faceless nude female bodies, the different elements of the anatomy recombined in biologically impossible ways, or arranged in cropped clumps. When not heaped in a barely defined landscape, the bodies are placed in architectural or mirror-like frames. The flesh is rendered with a cosmetic finish and contrasted with the flat rendering of moon faces and birds. There is a playful eroticism to the work, but there is also a forced aspect that either highlights or subtracts from it, depending on the painting. That is her treatment of various other figurative elements, whether birds or the moon. Cast in a different style than the flesh, the contrast, I assume, should be jarring and give it a...

  Previously, I have discussed my reservations around the employment of the role of “narrative” in exhibitions. Specifically, this involves the lack of clarity in how this notion translates to the visual display of work and how interaction with the work actually operates. Unless you stretch the term to its breaking point, very little in the practical visual logic of most exhibitions has any strong narrative content. This just seems like an unnaturally appended term to appeal to concepts that can then (presumably) be projected onto the work when it is not clearly evident. As such, it allows for the set-up of a fantasy of relations that the material reality of the work demonstrates to be absent. As a strategy, it is a way of trying to smuggle things in without doing the work that would make them sensible as visual art (if they can even make sense that way). So, an appeal to narrative is primarily an authoritarian device of enframing, something that tends to be the reserve of curatin...

The new exhibition at Fondation Guido Molinari takes a fundamentally different tack than its last few historical shows. Molinari the 60s and the 70s were both defined by decade, although this was limited to the highlighting of a small body of work and contained only slight means for contextually making their historical framing very meaningful. As a result, while interesting, the curation of the paintings did not typically shed much light on them, nor did it let either simply stand as a show of works. The latter quality is something that is clearly present in Art Mûr’s current show of Claude Tousignant works, mixing those from the 1950s with some more recent ones. Making very little effort to historicize them, they stand quite comfortably as another current exhibition. The show at the Molinari, by contrast, does something very different. Curated by Marie Fraser, L’œil attentif , is described as reconstructing “a fragment of the The Responsive Eye exhibition presented in 1965 at th...