Art in Montreal

  Stuck on the metro beside an anglophone with a manicured beard and beanie and a nondescript female companion, I listened as he bemoaned entering the “dark romantic era” of his life just as Gen Z was apparently abandoning their brief commitment to “new sincerity” and “post-irony” only to return to an irony that he pathologized as being a psychological defense mechanism to avoid dark thoughts.  This article is mostly about not understanding what people are referring to. Why bring this anecdote up? It seems vaguely relevant to the shows I saw before getting on the metro. Not that it strikes me as relevant to much of the work itself, none of which seemed especially ironic, post-ironic, sincere, or romantic, but these were things that some of the PR material around them marketed them as. The cruder and more relevant thing is that it is an example of someone constructing some narrative about their subjectivity (or someone else’s) and recognizing (at least performatively), that t...

  The group show Radar at Galerie Hughes Charbonneau does not have much unity. It is figurative and not; it contains painting, drawing, sculpture, etc. There is some extremely loose representational concern, but resonance between the works is hardly laboured, even though some can be detected. It is also uneven, so I will focus on the better work. Marie Danielle Duval is back with more of the same of what she has shown there and elsewhere. She continues her obsessive attention to pattern and the melding of the figure to décor. The fusion of figure and detail comes through more here than before and the heads of her figures continue to have a floating quality, as though she can’t commit to a full-on mimetism between figure and ground. These themes are coincidentally suggested in titles for Kimberly Orjuela ’s sculptures, which are a mixture of figures and objects, with the former far superior to the latter. The two stand-outs in the show are the pieces by Karam Arteen and Mallora...

Steve Giasson’s Andy Warhol at Laroche/Joncas Steve Giasson paints and draws several copies of Warhol works, often filtered through the copies of those works by other artists to the point that they are more depictions of copies. As exercises in representing painting, the works at Laroche/Joncas are exercises in intimacy and affection that are very different from the wrapped works of Tammi Campbell’s On View shown at Blouin|Division recently. Here, the show becomes a demonstration of touching through the reproduction of the image, given new mediation, and reconstituted. Generally of a different scale than the first and its copies, these re-imaginings are not simply invitations to a kind of mental comparison, itself perhaps rife with a kind of nostalgia. The framing justification claims “[h]is committed and tongue-in-cheek practice is based on pre-existing artworks or historical or daily fragments, which he appropriates in different ways, in order to undermine romantic notions...