Art in Montreal

The works that make up Christian Messier ’s Symphonie en brun Van Dyck at Masion de la culture Janine-Sutto first showed at L'Œil de poisson in Québec City earlier in the year. Organized as a series of diptychs, it pairs his paintings with his musical compositions. Using a QR code, visitors can listen to the music paired with each painting on their phones. The paintings in oil and the music on synthesizer are intended to “share a common system that creates a tension between the characteristics that unite them and the properties that make them unique.” Effectively, what Messier presents is a kind of visual album, both in the sense of a musical album and a loose album of prints. In a way, they can be experienced like this on his website. The contrast feels a little like what was often displayed in the Italian exploitation films of the 70s, where a lush and haunting score (by Ennio Morricone or Riz Ortolani) was superimposed on scenes of torture, rape, and cannibalism, all usual

Benoit Blondeau ’s work on exhibition at COA is part of a two-person show with Vinna Begin. Although their works complement each other reasonably in terms of colour and even to some degree thematically, his work overshadows hers with its more substantive material presence. Combining painting and quilting, his work brings together a variety of fabrics and patterns, sewn into what often resemble the areal views of land allotments. The fabrics can be suggestive in their tactility or evocative in their selected details, such as the appearance of part of a buttoned shirt. There is not much of a rationale presented for Blondeau’s work. On his website, he couches it in vaguely Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, referencing rhizomes and insisting on a sort of territoriality in the work. The work is taken to be an expression of the specific material qualities of Laval, filtered through the phenomenal recollections of his childhood (sheets, grandmother’s quilts) and trash. Although he divorces his wo

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

  You don’t see a great deal of erotic art in the city, so it was a pleasant surprise to walk into Hannaleah Ledwell Rêves insolites at Galerie Popop . The works span the last few years and there is some divergence in terms of the treatment of spatialization even if the colour schemes remain consistent. These shifts don’t appear to have been linear, although there does seem to have been a gradual flattening of the surface and simplification of its texture. The earlier paintings are a bit more built up, almost sculptural in articulation, which also gives them a slightly more morbid quality.  Rêves insolites explores the physical manifestations of love languages. Focusing on intimacy with oneself and with others, this body of work aims to convey tangible sensations, both corporeal and emotional. It is an exploration of the viscerality of touch, the softness of a caress, the vulnerability of pleasure and the chaotic mix of all these feelings at once. The more surprising thing about

  What follows is a review of three different exhibitions. They are presented here because they have significant thematic/conceptual overlap and demonstrate different strategies of approach in a wide variety of media. Although the first and second approach the spectre of colonialism loosely, the last exploits it as its central feature. Mathieu Gotti’s La grande Liquidation tout doit disparaître at Art Mûr This is a repackaging of much the same work by Mathieu Gotti that was shown at the Centre d’art Jacques et Michel Auger in Victoriaville in 2021, although the scaling here is more confined. It involves a set of painted wood carvings, primarily of animals, but also of weaponry, gas cans etc. Carving marks are prominent and the paint application is crude if never garish. In general, they have the sense of inflated toys. Spread around the front of the gallery, they also give the impression of being more accumulated like a snow drift than thoughtfully placed. If they are toyish, t

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.

  Clint Neufeld ’s All hat No cattle at Art Mûr contains pieces of glassware, serving plates and furniture in various vague period styles that roughly suggest the late 18th and early 19th centuries. On them, whether resting on pillows or seemingly growing from or embracing them, are various industrial implements. The ways his work has been talked about have been rather boring and predictable, seeing in it some sort of statement about gender or defamiliarization . An almost identical set of strategies were employed with Cal Lane in the same space just a month ago. Neufeld falls into this sometimes but usually seems to just tell anecdotes about his life. In a way, this is the far better way to approach the works.

Just by happenstance (presumably), there were three shows more or less side-by-side dealing with the same basic thematic. At Arprim, Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc’s Les ruines enfouies sont repérables par quelques détours archéologiques , and over at Circa, the paired exhibitions De l’écran à la pierre by Andrée-Anne Carrier and Une trace ineffaçable n’est pas une trace from Chloë Charce. All deal broadly with notions of archaeology, fossilization, and visual illusion. To start with Leduc, there are obvious (deliberate or not) nods to cubist collage and to the reliefs of Arp, but, as it says in the accompanying text, the show is more concerned with cataloguing recent design fads.

  Eddy Firmin 's Orgueil et préjugés spans two substantial rooms at Art Mûr , employing installations of appropriated items, sculptures, video, and photography. Stylistically, these suggest regional museum aesthetics, installation art, advertising, jewellery display cases, video essays and so on. The eclecticism of strategies does not suggest museographic critique so much as artistic egoism, consistently returning to images of the artist. The performative heterogeneity of its material resources ironically only points to the homogeneity of its polemical references and techniques. Together they blur the viability of any kind of point.

Molinari, the 1960s at the fondation Guido Molinari displays 9 of his acrylic paintings, 2 seriagraphs, 1 sculpture, a collage, and some preliminary sketches. It takes up the entire exhibition space, including the vault. Some remnants of the artist’s studio are maintained in a corner and can be peered into. While the juxtaposition of differentiated areas gives the show a very loose developmental narrative, not much else helps it along. The wall texts are primarily quotations from reviews and catalogues which provide a broad suggestion of the theoretical undepinnings of some of the work. The small historicizing texts and images, displayed by dates as in a ledger, provide an extremely vague context. But it is context that seems otherwise absent. The 60s were a crucial period in his work and the mechanics of the art world in Canada at the time go some way to explaining why he became one of the country’s few high-profile artists.

Tiny perceptions are as much he passage from one perception to the another as they are components of perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are ‘pricklings,’ or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain. - Gilles Deleuze  Occupying three rooms in the basement space of Bradley Ertaskiran , Mathieu Beauséjour’s Demi-monde operates through three distinct stations. The first features three images, each a superimposition that abstracts images of bodies and exaggerates the grain of their source material. The second is a series of white painted boxes with walls torn out to reveal miniature rooms, all crudely made, their various staircases and bunkers suggesting both the exhibition space and the illusionism of Escher, only run into dead ends instead of infinities. And third, the largest of the spaces contains a video projection, several brass sculptures, medium-sized photographic works, and four sets of diced image

There is a curious affinity between two shows on at the Belgo. Both exhibitions involve games of distances, projections of bodies, whether they are human, celestial, or the guts of houses. Le murmure d'une empreinte by Caroline Mauxion (with Céline Huyghebaert and Elise Anne LaPlante) at Arprim attempts to capture the subtle and ephemeral traces of the body in space, heightening its suggestiveness to a poetic density through abstracting it into fragmented and de-familarized aspects of flesh and simplified sculpture renderings.

Sponsored by Caisse Desjardins and AC/E’s Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture, the VOX exhibition’s opening pedagogical text asserts that the works in L’imaginaire radical II: désœuvrer la valeur collectively propose to offer a set of hypothetical alternatives (which they identify as: “1) decolonize/ecologize; 2) measure; 3) organize; 4) speculate/fabulate”) to the “knowledge” offered by financial models, defined in terms of legibility and statistics. More fully: This exhibition and its accompanying events and texts speak to an attempt to produce “finance-proof” knowledge—that is to say, a space in which to consider the notion of value and its forms that is immune to the economic categorical imperative. That imperative, of course, is that of growth and profitability: the dominion of measurement, of the readability of indexes, of statistical commensurability. In the place of this, the curatorial position statement suggests, are a set of rival propositions or p