Art in Montreal

Once again Pangée is a uniquely good host for the two exhibitions that it currently has on. The creaking floors of the old mansion, perched on the mountain and seemingly detached while sitting aside the swelling roadways and pathways that cross its side tend to do far more for the works it displays than the bland rectangles of the rest of the city. Generally, Projet Casa still feels too homey but Pangée feels like an artificially maintained leftover from a dead society. It also tends to stress the works it puts on display as functions of décor. Grace Kalyta’s Hall of Mirrors is basically a painting show bleeding into sculpture. The various works depict furnishings and fabrics for the most part. Their ostensible subject matter is the surfaces of stuff, which here tends to be dealt with in two broad ways. One is the painterly depiction of light and texture and the other extends this surface concern to a more literal kind of objectification where the depiction of the surface and the surf

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

There were three exhibitions focusing on the Torma-Zsako family in the city over the past month or so. One at Robert Poulin ( Métamorphoses ) that featured them heavily, one at Laroche/Joncas ( 1 famille, 4 artistes, 2 expositions ), and this one at Projet Casa ( Flowers, Warriors, Beasts, Hands: Divergences et réciprocité ). Unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of overlap between them. The Poulin and Casa shows were, however, the stronger. The Casa show displayed them at their most uneven and Istvan’s and David ’s sculptures dominated. At Poulin it was Balint ’s watercolours and Anna ’s sewn works that overshadowed the others. The Casa show was very much a sculpture show and the Poulin show was a wall art one.