Art in Montreal

Arriving during the summer slump (festival season) for galleries is the 20th edition of Art Mûr’s annual survey of the work of (primarily) grad students from MFA programmes across the country. And it is interesting again because the survey form and its absence of supplementation largely removes any clear intentionality and whatever “meaning” there seems to be comes largely from coincidences of display. Aside from checking if they had websites, I have made no effort to discern the significance of the works involved beyond how they appear in this context. The exhibition Fresh Paint and New Construction, a not-to-be-missed annual event, celebrates its 20th edition this year. As every July at Art Mûr gallery, the works of students from twelve Canadian universities are brought together in a collective exhibition, offering a captivating immersion into new artistic approaches. This edition is no exception, with a selection of works highlighting the innovation and creativity of the next gen...

This week we will look at two current exhibitions that overlap in framing and style, one stressing the elliptical and the other softness. At Blouin|Division is Ellipses by Angela Grauerholz , featuring work that spans from the 1980s until a couple of years ago. The retrospective quality reinforces the retrospective content of the images, both of which tend to suggest an indifferent (or at least foggy) temporality. While there have been some distinct tangents in her career, there is not much indication of them here. What is on display is the kind of thing she has been best known for (and which has been central to her other more or less retrospective shows), namely photos of display spaces (galleries, museums, gardens) and the various windows to the world that they echo (door and window frames as stand-ins for the frames around art or their devices of capture and vice versa). The gallery frames it this way : Grauerholz’s images have the preternatural ability to be experienced as fra...

The mayonnaise doesn’t take, all these beautiful people are just getting together to ape a culture, to pretend. We live, without suspecting it I suppose, in a simulation of culture, fundamentally unreal - the illusion is total, but we only have the empty appearance of things, never the reality. Laurent-Michel Vacher, Dialogues en ruine (1996) In Trou de mémoire (1968), Hubert Aquin has one of his characters write, “Québec is a poor troop of stuttering players afflicted with amnesia, who stare at each other with questioning looks.” This could be a description of the province’s Contemporary Art. It certainly seems like an apt description of how it was talked about by its apologists during the days of the doomed Triennales. Doom and horror tend to hover around a fair amount of the city’s Contemporary Art. It is usually marketed less crudely than this would suggest. Certainly, you could make a reasonable case for the rise of horror aesthetics and thematism in Contemporary Art, both ...

  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...