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

  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

  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

Fruit bowls, dolls and their dismembered limbs, stickers, and what look like renderings of film stills are what make up the minimal contents of Alexis Lavoie ’s latest show at Simon Blais . Childhood imagery has long been part of his work. This used to be theatricalized in a deliberate way, working on larger canvases with architectural settings. There were also clear and consistent nods to Francis Bacon and to media events like Abu Ghraib, all slit in amid the birthday decorations for a kid’s party. These paintings (selected from work made between 2019-2022) don’t have that scope of content. Lavoie’s latest oils follow the direction to greater minimalism that he seems to have been going in over his past few shows. This is true in terms of his treatment of surfaces, his range of referents, and his use of scale. The imagery primarily consists of doll limbs, fruit, and bowls. There is a studied sense of painting plastic while flattening the plasticity of the paint application as much