Art in Montreal

  Last week we looked at two shows that were prop-heavy. Whether painting or multi-media installation, the result was a stress on objectification that bypassed their literary inspiration. They ended up concentrating on props that were not reducible to theatricality. If anything, they foregrounded a kind of anti-theatricality, or a theatre in the absence of drama, a theatre of properties rather than performances. This week, we look at two shows where the use of the medium would also seem to suggest a prop quality, like steam-rolled dioramas. They also have something more closely approximating the documentary, and, notably, not the kind of documentary “ neoliberal ” aesthetic that tends to crop up. In these two shows, there is a stress, both thematic and formal, on localization and the sense in which the intensive quality of an aspect can be delineated by divergent rendering. They both frequently employ visual strategies that suggest cloisonné and are usefully seen as types of relief p

Last year, we detected a tendency toward literary adaptation in several shows that attempted to stage the literary work as a visual spectacle. This continues in two very different directions in a pair of shows on at the Belgo now. The first follows a loosely illustrative move and the second a more formally complex inter-textual one. They are thematically linked by being ostensibly concerned with identity, both in terms of their source material’s themes and their methodology, which introduces a relation between the material and the artist. This thematic concern tends to be overshadowed by the content of the works on display. According to the curatorial text for Marie-Danielle Duval ’s Emerald Room at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau: The exhibition presents a series of intimate paintings and drawings featuring black female figures inspired by Denver, a fictional character from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. These paintings offer narrative spaces conducive to reflection and repose for th

Occupying the top floor of Art Mûr, Éric Lamontagne’s La nature des choses muettes offers a selection of painted works. These are variations on the landscape genre. The spaces are presented, usually in a vertical format that suggests portraiture more than traditional landscape painting. Rather than suggesting the sublime, they tend toward the satiric, their images punctuated in an overtly literal way with butterflies cut out and extracted or discarded cigarettes and toilet paper seemingly rolled from the face of nature, leaving absences behind. Sometimes we can see that the image of nature has been rendered in ways that suggest digital pixelation and, in a few instances, the canvas is a wreck, either ruined by “nature” or dramatically embodying its destruction. The accompanying text spells out this reading as, “Here, the artist interjects into the landscape in a similar destructive manner that we as humans have intervened into the natural world.” But the logic of the works suggests

In the previous installment of this sketchy exploration of the political economy of Canada’s artworld, I dealt mostly with the specifics of Québec, notably with the corruption that some polemically suggested was central to how its art system functions. Here, I take a boarder view. In the background, more implied than argued here, is that Contemporary Art is a genre, at least if this term is understood in the way it has been employed by film theorists like Rick Altman and Steve Neale, to designate a heterogeneous matrix with consistent furniture, strategies of hybridization, and a clear pattern of industrial production that has to a substantial degree determined its formal qualities. As Altman has claimed, genres are best understood as “contraptions capable of performing multiple tasks” that allow for the general summing up of formula, structure, and expectation, providing a “conduit” for the flow of desires. [Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 14-15] T

  This week it is several different shows from Pictura . Louis-Philippe Côté ’s La chambre aux miroirs at Simon Blais consists of two quite different bodies of work. This is a strategy that seems to be in keeping with his general practice over the past few years. To one side are these hazy, warm-toned canvases that seem packed with art historical allusions and are loosely divided in patterns that suggest frames within frames. As such, they tend to suggest a form of analyzing the image, dissecting it, but in a way that does not clarify its constitutive aspects but blurs them.  To the other side are a series of collage/abstract paintings. A warm, flat colour falls in the background upon which a more pastel ground is built. Squares are set at each extreme of the canvas and images are added. This kind of visual combination, quite common among painters within the city in the late 1960s and early 70s, seems imbued with a different quality by Côté, within which this encounter between medi

In past articles, I have revisited some of the polemics for and against Contemporary Art in the city. This was done both by describing two of its key early events - Québec ‘75 and Aurora Borealis - as well as by looking at one of the first attacks on its development and one of the primary defenses of it. All of this could be contextualized within the generally uncertain historical aftermath of Refus global and the “revolutions” of the 1960s, as a state-supported art system and artificial economy were erected. In line with those sketches, this article looks at a polemical text from the turn of the millennium that provides a kind of halfway checkpoint between this earlier era and where we are now: artist Marcel Deschênes , L'art de qui?: analyse et description chiffrées de ce qui nous tient lieu de marché de l'art (2003). But first, I will start with an anecdote. There was a mild furor created (deliberately) in La Presse during November of 1991 when Jean-Claude Lebl