Art in Montreal

  Thankfully, summer is ending, and the undeserved holiday season that galleries take is coming to a close. I review two current exhibitions below, but they come with a preamble. Prefacing that, I should say that I have little doubt that the tendencies discussed below would have emerged without AI; so, the suggestion is not that they share deep cultural continuity, but that they share incidental formal traits. I am on the fence about the likely implications of AI for art (it seems much clearer for other fields), but it annoys enough people that it is at least potentially interesting. Despite the “newness” that people associate with it, AI’s artistic potential seems to be entirely in step with the ambitions of significant aspects of the avant-garde from a hundred years ago. However, the dreams of an automatic, depersonalized art made by machines that would eliminate elitism — and which were central to many Modernist ambitions — seem entirely out of step with the reac...

Jérôme Fortin’s Dance: choreographic variations for the eye at Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain involves two sets of monotypes. One series ( Danser ) is more interesting as a concept, the evidence of which you are left with, while the other ( Lignes ) is more visually stimulating. Composed of 50 pieces, for Danser Fortin folded, unfolded, and refolded strips of paper before printing them on sheets of paper so that only their reliefs remained. The results are mildly decorative, with a loosely elliptical quality and, if one wished to playfully extrapolate, are suggestive of the muddled foot moves of an old dance instruction manual. As to their tactility, it is slight, and as a whole they register more as background noise than a set of images. Stretching them out along the wall as they are gives them some animation, but it’s a bit limpid.