Art in Montreal

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

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

Volupté , the new group show at Blouin|Division , features the work of 8 artists: Amanda Ba, Geneviève Cadieux, Shona McAndrew, GaHee Park, Elena Redmond, Hiba Schahbaz, Corri-Lynn Tetz, and Chloe Wise. It joins a set of erotic art shows that have been seen in the city over the past year (such as Mia Sandhu , Hannaleah Ledwell , Kara Eckler and Caroline Schub ), although it is notable for being the least ambitious or thoughtful of them, as well as the most uneven in quality. According to its press materials, in [b]ringing together a group of female-identifying artists from various backgrounds, Volupté aims to draw an alternative portrait of pleasure, one that dispels masked fears about the emancipation of female pleasure outside of patriarchal control. [p] The artists brought together in this project are exploring desire in its various expressions, whether it is psychological, physical, sensory, or erotic. Pleasure is represented as complex and multifarious and often posited at a wi

Steve Giasson’s Andy Warhol at Laroche/Joncas Steve Giasson paints and draws several copies of Warhol works, often filtered through the copies of those works by other artists to the point that they are more depictions of copies. As exercises in representing painting, the works at Laroche/Joncas are exercises in intimacy and affection that are very different from the wrapped works of Tammi Campbell’s On View shown at Blouin|Division recently. Here, the show becomes a demonstration of touching through the reproduction of the image, given new mediation, and reconstituted. Generally of a different scale than the first and its copies, these re-imaginings are not simply invitations to a kind of mental comparison, itself perhaps rife with a kind of nostalgia. The framing justification claims “[h]is committed and tongue-in-cheek practice is based on pre-existing artworks or historical or daily fragments, which he appropriates in different ways, in order to undermine romantic notions

  Three different shows of mostly painting this week. One of these was quite good while the others were not to widely varying degrees. They are all settled in vague mythological spaces. Both Leong and Jaouich’s shows are afflicted with a hysterical form of reactionary humanism while Daigneault’s is an admirably concise rendering of pessimistic comedy.

  What connects these two shows, and I won’t labour the point, is writing. By coincidence, they fit intriguingly within the trend that seems to be going on with artists attempting to negotiate text in exhibitions. In the case of Didier Morelli , this seems very conscious, especially since it is as much a work of curation and ressentimentalization as anything else. In Louise Robert, text was an essential part of her practice and the attempt to think through its graphic possibilities was central. Hommage à Louise Robert (1941-2022) at Galerie Simon Blais Among the province’s Contemporary artists, Louise Robert has been written about more than most. Self-taught, her early work mimed Automatism until her graphism expanded to include what looks like writing, and sometimes is such, sometimes a title or allusion, sometimes just the appearance of writing. While the place of writing in her work is the perennial issue that is taken up, it is usually in reference to écriture , whether unders

The works that make up Christian Messier ’s Symphonie en brun Van Dyck at Masion de la culture Janine-Sutto first showed at L'Œil de poisson in Québec City earlier in the year. Organized as a series of diptychs, it pairs his paintings with his musical compositions. Using a QR code, visitors can listen to the music paired with each painting on their phones. The paintings in oil and the music on synthesizer are intended to “share a common system that creates a tension between the characteristics that unite them and the properties that make them unique.” Effectively, what Messier presents is a kind of visual album, both in the sense of a musical album and a loose album of prints. In a way, they can be experienced like this on his website. The contrast feels a little like what was often displayed in the Italian exploitation films of the 70s, where a lush and haunting score (by Ennio Morricone or Riz Ortolani) was superimposed on scenes of torture, rape, and cannibalism, all usual

Benoit Blondeau ’s work on exhibition at COA is part of a two-person show with Vinna Begin. Although their works complement each other reasonably in terms of colour and even to some degree thematically, his work overshadows hers with its more substantive material presence. Combining painting and quilting, his work brings together a variety of fabrics and patterns, sewn into what often resemble the areal views of land allotments. The fabrics can be suggestive in their tactility or evocative in their selected details, such as the appearance of part of a buttoned shirt. There is not much of a rationale presented for Blondeau’s work. On his website, he couches it in vaguely Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, referencing rhizomes and insisting on a sort of territoriality in the work. The work is taken to be an expression of the specific material qualities of Laval, filtered through the phenomenal recollections of his childhood (sheets, grandmother’s quilts) and trash. Although he divorces his wo

One of the more consistently interesting artists to pass through the city over the past fifteen years or so, Nicolas Grenier crosses into some new territory in his current exhibition at Bradley Ertaskiran , Esquisses d’un inventaire . His work has frequently tied ideas of urbanism, disaster, paranoia, and social decay together through the appropriating of high-end corporate design, itself heavily indebted to the work of non-objective painting. (Coincidentally, Grenier is also currently showing work in a group exhibition at Fondation Guido Molinari .) This was approached in a range of cascading warm and cool colours and juxtaposed with various texts and occasional interpolated imagery to suggest the sorts of scenarios that typically get termed dystopian or utopian . I have always found them more ambiguous than these terms suggest and something far closer to the ambivalence one can see at play in the work of novelist J.G. Ballard. The English author was always explicit about his deb

  You don’t see a great deal of erotic art in the city, so it was a pleasant surprise to walk into Hannaleah Ledwell Rêves insolites at Galerie Popop . The works span the last few years and there is some divergence in terms of the treatment of spatialization even if the colour schemes remain consistent. These shifts don’t appear to have been linear, although there does seem to have been a gradual flattening of the surface and simplification of its texture. The earlier paintings are a bit more built up, almost sculptural in articulation, which also gives them a slightly more morbid quality.  Rêves insolites explores the physical manifestations of love languages. Focusing on intimacy with oneself and with others, this body of work aims to convey tangible sensations, both corporeal and emotional. It is an exploration of the viscerality of touch, the softness of a caress, the vulnerability of pleasure and the chaotic mix of all these feelings at once. The more surprising thing about