Art in Montreal

  The group show Radar at Galerie Hughes Charbonneau does not have much unity. It is figurative and not; it contains painting, drawing, sculpture, etc. There is some extremely loose representational concern, but resonance between the works is hardly laboured, even though some can be detected. It is also uneven, so I will focus on the better work. Marie Danielle Duval is back with more of the same of what she has shown there and elsewhere. She continues her obsessive attention to pattern and the melding of the figure to décor. The fusion of figure and detail comes through more here than before and the heads of her figures continue to have a floating quality, as though she can’t commit to a full-on mimetism between figure and ground. These themes are coincidentally suggested in titles for Kimberly Orjuela ’s sculptures, which are a mixture of figures and objects, with the former far superior to the latter. The two stand-outs in the show are the pieces by Karam Arteen and Mallora...

  Last week we looked at two exhibitions that more or less dealt with the notion of “home.” In both instances, this was also inflected with the spectre of ruination. One did so in an overtly theatrical manner involving a lot of “meta-modernist” pastiche and “archaeological” stylization while the other concocted a self-destructive narrative of “displacement” that testified to the distance between art and the subjective fantasy of home. The notion of housing has also been cropping up a bit lately at Skol. They have had two group shows in the past few months dealing directly with it in a variety of guises lately. The currently on view Catalogue des ruines in certain respects was a logical follow-up to Mode d’emploi pour habitation invisible (User’s Manual for an Invisible Home) . If the latter relied on the idea of human structures as a basic model, the former relies on the notion of the world remade around the human in a far more extreme way. The exhibition’s text describes it...