Art in Montreal

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 thi...

  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 toyis...