Art in Montreal

Curated by Trevor Kiernander and featuring artists from several countries, Reverb is part of the second edition of the Pictura Triennale (we looked at a very different exhibition from it last week). The event’s organizers define it as : a project that has been in constant development with the specific intention of collectively presenting the various formal, critical, and political positions of Montreal painting to a wider audience, with the aim of bringing international attention to Montreal, which is probably one of the central cities for painting in Canada. The works selected by Kiernander are on display at Art Mûr and form a miniature survey of trends that he has encountered over the past several years and which he frames in reference to the difficulties posed to painting in the post-internet era. Artists selected are Colin Canary, Beth Frey, Ian Gonczarow, Anaïs Goupy, Karine Guyon, Claudia Kleiner, Lauren Pelc McArthur, John Drew Munro, Ianick Raymond, and Megan Wade-Darrag

The three exhibitions this week may only seem very loosely related. In their own ways, they each imagine utopias, and they each do so with an appeal to the childish, whether in the form of illustration or through their “educational” posing. At Optica is Leyla Majer ’s Anticipating Hypersea. The accompanying text by Esther Bourdages states that Majeri is proposing an environment that brings together three bodies of work that showcase her research on the deconstruction and decolonization of prevailing ideas, borrowing themes associated with a kind of fictional ethnography and speculative biology. […] Plants and living things are the artist’s raw material. The exhibited hybrid assemblages are composed of gourds and ceramics. While some varieties of gourds, also called calabashes, are edible, most are not. They are generally cultivated not as food, but to serve as a recipient, an ornament, or a sound box. Their dissemination is the outcome of human migratory activity and natural eleme

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Refus global , that signature event that has been consistently taken as the harbinger of the province’s modernity, the icon of the passage from the mythical Grande noirceur to the equally mythical Révolution tranquille, that sign of the origin of multidisciplinary and the first moment of a proto-feminist art, etc. To reflect on this, here is a review of Sophie Dubois’ Refus global: Histoire d'une réception partielle (2017), based on her award-winning dissertation, and one of the most admirably anti-lyrical depictions of the function of Automatism in the province’s intellectual (or spiritual) life that has been published. Dubois’ basic concern is what allowed the original collection, possessed and read by so few initially (or subsequently), to reach the point that it could become a generic referent in pulp fiction by the end of the millennium. She asserts that “The survival of the work does not depend on internal factors

Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert have complementary exhibitions on the work of Betty Goodwin. The eponymous show has works in several media (prints, proofs, works on mylar, etc.) spanning a few decades and showing different aspects of her practice. It has a condensed retrospective quality. The other show consists mostly of photos taken by Geoffrey James of her studio for Canadian Art in 1994. Although there are a few colour works, almost everything in the two shows tends to black and white. This is not stark, but highly textured. Everything becomes about gradients and minute details. The James photos concentrate on all the objects of her practice, either seemingly carefully or haphazardly arranged on various surfaces, and given structure by the architecture that seems to hem them in. Aside from the rather underwhelming colour mylar pieces, most of the work was created when Goodwin was moving away from typical Pop style imagery to something more “personal.” The vest works tha

The new exhibition at Fondation Guido Molinari takes a fundamentally different tack than its last few historical shows. Molinari the 60s and the 70s were both defined by decade, although this was limited to the highlighting of a small body of work and contained only slight means for contextually making their historical framing very meaningful. As a result, while interesting, the curation of the paintings did not typically shed much light on them, nor did it let either simply stand as a show of works. The latter quality is something that is clearly present in Art Mûr’s current show of Claude Tousignant works, mixing those from the 1950s with some more recent ones. Making very little effort to historicize them, they stand quite comfortably as another current exhibition. The show at the Molinari, by contrast, does something very different. Curated by Marie Fraser, L’œil attentif , is described as reconstructing “a fragment of the The Responsive Eye exhibition presented in 1965 at th

This week, I leave Montr é al and travel to Hull to see a show at the Galerie Université du Québec en Outaouais . Over the rusting bridges from the purgatory that is Ottawa, Hull is an eccentric mixture of heterogeneous architectural styles that garishly clash with one another thanks to the city’s history of consistently stunted growth, lopsided development, and near collapse. Passing by the rather sad Parc Jean Dallaire (still nowhere near as depressing as  Montréal ’s Parc Prudence Heward), I got lost navigating the circular streets and cul de sacs broken up by green paths and intersected by dead and overgrown rail lines. The university building housing the gallery feels more like a high school, seemingly dropped in at random beyond one of the main stretches, which itself was mostly devoid of people, only boulangeries run from the basements of converted houses and random massage parlours. This exhibition by Antoine Larocque was housed in a blank gallery space at the corner of a