Art in Montreal

  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.

{I will preface this by stating that I don’t think I enjoyed another show in the city so much this past year.} According to the exhibition essay for Mia Sandhu 's Seeing You, Seeing Me, Seeing You at Patel|Brown : It's not just the earthly colour palette that triggers olfactory hallucinations of musty shag-carpets, smokey floral upholstery, and dusty rattan furniture. All elements in Sandhu's drawings come together to produce a synaesthetic reaction — you can smell, hear, taste, and feel her staged environments. And you do so in the position of voyeur. However, the aesthetics of the exhibition as a whole have far less to do with pornography in the 1970s – particularly in its North American form (it looks more British/Scandinavian) – than with the aesthetics of sitcoms and game shows. There is far more The Price is Right than Penthouse on display.