Art in Montreal

  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...

They are more interesting for making explicit something that has been implicit in a number of shows over the last while, namely a general ambivalence about the destruction of the world. This is not the sort of thing that seems to be curatorially admitted, even if it is logically implied in many of the works included in such shows. Dante Guthrie , Lindsay Lion Lord , William Mora , Andrew Rutherdale , and Cléo Sjölander are the artists showing under the banner of Annihilation at Galerie Laroche/Joncas . Sparely placed around the room, the show is dominated by the work of Rutherdale, who presents various insect reliquaries and some Chapmanesque gag about the Enlightenment. There is a hodgepodge of over-ornamentation that suggests the Spanish Baroque recast in more decorative than religious form. These are nicely complemented by the sculptures in stoneware and clay by Mora, which have the quality of dilapidated outsider art rescued from an abandoned farmhouse. Framed in explicitly the...