Art in Montreal

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

La multitude déchue is a show of drawings, photos, and little sculptures by Peter Gnass at Art Mûr . The majority of them are dated 2009-2011 and were previously shown at Maison de la Culture Côte-des-Neiges in 2016. Suggestive enough to be topical, they aren’t topical enough to suggest much. If it isn’t quite as visually crude as Félipe Goulet Letarte , conceptually, it seems even weaker. While the former was so (unintentionally?) ambiguous that it became paradoxical and farcical, Gnass is much more puritanical and dull.