Art in Montreal

The fall season is here and galleries are opening their doors again. The art spaces at the Gaspé relaunched last week with the halls including a poster declaring the ongoing panic about the decline of culture and its potential ruination. The point comes across with a certain degree of ambiguity in the wording and this provides a useful backdrop to what will be discussed in this article. This selection of reviews is organized in a more or less thematic manner. The theme is primarily monumentality and secondarily some other, maybe more interesting things. Monumentality is a pretty standard theme in art discourse, localized in discussions of its earliest iterations in religious art and territorial markings. Monuments are one clear way to leave a trace or mark-up a landscape. The term tends to conjure the sculptural but certainly is not limited to it. A monument often indicates and memorializes the passage of some historical event, standing in for it as a kind of presence that may cast a...

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.