Art in Montreal

Espace Loulou is a small space at the north end of Saint Laurent that you reach in a brown elevator. It is currently hosting the show Le Jour Défait , by two artists I have discussed previously, Christian Messier and Syrine Daigneault . Made up of a small set of paintings, they are woven together through a set of recurrent referents (match held by hand, volcanoes) and more elaborate tableaux. The show is given a certain unity thanks to these recurrences and to the styles of the two painters which, while distinct, do not abrasively rub against one another but work in a complementary way. According to the exhibition statement : Syrine draws her inspiration from the contingency of social norms and the construction of reality. Her paintings visually capture the tension between individual consciousness and learned social behaviour. This sharp perception, exacerbated by the derealization she experiences, translates into an exploration of the vital force that emanates from this lucidity. ...

  Last week we looked at two shows that were prop-heavy. Whether painting or multi-media installation, the result was a stress on objectification that bypassed their literary inspiration. They ended up concentrating on props that were not reducible to theatricality. If anything, they foregrounded a kind of anti-theatricality, or a theatre in the absence of drama, a theatre of properties rather than performances. This week, we look at two shows where the use of the medium would also seem to suggest a prop quality, like steam-rolled dioramas. They also have something more closely approximating the documentary, and, notably, not the kind of documentary “ neoliberal ” aesthetic that tends to crop up. In these two shows, there is a stress, both thematic and formal, on localization and the sense in which the intensive quality of an aspect can be delineated by divergent rendering. They both frequently employ visual strategies that suggest cloisonné and are usefully seen as types of reli...

Benoit Blondeau ’s work on exhibition at COA is part of a two-person show with Vinna Begin. Although their works complement each other reasonably in terms of colour and even to some degree thematically, his work overshadows hers with its more substantive material presence. Combining painting and quilting, his work brings together a variety of fabrics and patterns, sewn into what often resemble the areal views of land allotments. The fabrics can be suggestive in their tactility or evocative in their selected details, such as the appearance of part of a buttoned shirt. There is not much of a rationale presented for Blondeau’s work. On his website, he couches it in vaguely Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, referencing rhizomes and insisting on a sort of territoriality in the work. The work is taken to be an expression of the specific material qualities of Laval, filtered through the phenomenal recollections of his childhood (sheets, grandmother’s quilts) and trash. Although he divorces his wo...