Art in Montreal

Occupying the central space of Galerie Nicolas Robert, Kelly Jazvac ’s exhibition Le désir et le matriarcat has silver-toned lightboxes set around average eye level, cords running out of them and down along the floor. The boxes contain backlit transparencies of cropped and collaged body parts and blank fabric from magazine ads to suggest landscapes. Spanning a curve with various tangents are a series of carved display plinths, which are mostly open and have a sort of rib structure. Sculptural objects — hybridized from photos that have been woven combined with found waste objects and other scavenged materials — are alternately placed in or on top of them. The surfaces of the plinths are smoothed down to the point that they look more like veneer and are blankly stained for a “naturalistic” (in the sense of cosmetic foundation) look. The sculptural objects are vaguely reminiscent of various banal items (purses, burgers, computer gadgets, etc.). By the entrance is a stack of “bricks” wit...

  This week we look at four shows that superficially seem distinct but which reveal a variety of strategies for dealing with clearly shared concerns about the relation between the artist and their space, the eroticism of spatial connections, and attempts (not all successful) to deal with these things in terms of visual effects. Jérôme Bouchard ’s ni flaques, ni boue at galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert was inspired by a construction site in a park outside of Paris. The artist tried to map the territory using a LiDAR capture device, which transmitted data of the space through light measurements. This data provides a record of the erosion of the space and its transformation through ecological wastage. He explains that: By manipulating the data, I sought to explore the limits of this technology to capture such ‘third nature’ composed of waste, muddy puddles, gravel and earth, and plants. Since the floods of 2021 which destroyed my workshop in Belgium, I have been hau...

  In the space at the back of Galerie Nicolas Robert is a series of works by Chris Kline . Untitled and unnumbered, they fall under the general exhibition title, La Manche. Central to the works is their history as a medium that indexes the shifts in his working space. According to the framing statement : Nearly ten years ago Chris Kline began a process of reconfiguring his paintings. By deposing finished canvases from their stretchers, interposing them between the walls and floor in his studio, interleaving them between sheets of glass, plywood, raw canvas, and layers of gesso, an image appeared in a matrix of indirect ‘brush-strokes’: traces of the geometries of the absented stretcher-frame; the factures of cut, stretched, primed, painted cloth; and the surfaces of concrete and gypsum-board. Reframed and repositioned inside the expanded perimeters of new supports, this image was submerged under applications of paint; the palimpsest of second-hand brush-work dissolved. Indica...

Galerie Nicolas Robert has moved to a new spot on Saint-Laurent. Chapitre III: Exposition inaugurale recognizes the latest stage in the gallerist's career and contains the works of more than twenty artists associated with the gallery. The new space is bright and evenly lit. Far larger than the gallery’s former residence on King, with high ceilings and rough floors (in the front anteroom maybe too rough). The more interesting thing about the exhibition is that it works coherently as one despite having no real conceptual framework, and no apparent intention beyond an indexing or autobiography of the gallery. It could be interpreted as a partial catalogue of one person’s taste or at least their sense of the market. I am not going to speculate on either of those things. Part of what makes the exhibition work is a certain degree of thematic complementarity between the works (it is pretty loose), but even more in how the selection of extreme variations in colour and scale create a ...

A Symphony of Untold Depths at Galerie Nicolas Robert features the work of seven artists and Sunrise, Sunset at Bradley|Ertaskiran has work by thirteen. Both group shows are arranged around a broad theme. They pair interestingly since one is largely about projecting a face (or some other body part) onto the world and the other is about a world without faces. The results are a mixture of the sensual and slightly unnerving. The Bradley|Ertaskiran show is broader in scope and this thins it out a bit. A few of the works don’t quite belong and don’t add much, in particular two paintings by Janet Werner . The painting of hers that does fit, Moore , sits at the front of the exhibition. Encountered upon entrance, it is a little nightmarish work: loosely handled figures in a landscape suggesting something between the Historic rape genre that was popular for a while in Salon painting and the earth mother Primitivism popular among Modernists. It’s paired, appropriately enough, with a very d...