Art in Montreal

Jérôme Fortin’s Dance: choreographic variations for the eye at Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain involves two sets of monotypes. One series ( Danser ) is more interesting as a concept, the evidence of which you are left with, while the other ( Lignes ) is more visually stimulating. Composed of 50 pieces, for Danser Fortin folded, unfolded, and refolded strips of paper before printing them on sheets of paper so that only their reliefs remained. The results are mildly decorative, with a loosely elliptical quality and, if one wished to playfully extrapolate, are suggestive of the muddled foot moves of an old dance instruction manual. As to their tactility, it is slight, and as a whole they register more as background noise than a set of images. Stretching them out along the wall as they are gives them some animation, but it’s a bit limpid.

Art is free, or it is not. It invents, expresses itself and explores in all directions, or commits suicide by serving causes that are not its own. It is plural, diverse, crazy; or doctrinaire, intolerant and terribly serious. It asks questions to which we are fed answers everywhere. It stimulates the imagination, awakens utopias, and offers man the only game that rules do not hinder. And in this way, art energetically calls the whole environment into question. [29] Published in 1983, Guy Robert’s Art actuel au Québec: depuis 1970 provided an extensive survey of the art produced in the province in the 70s and early 80s (most of the art reproduced in the text is from 1980-1982.) It is a follow-up to his L'Art au Québec depuis 1940 of 1973 and examines what he takes to be the diversity of the plastic arts, under numerous names and tendencies, since the 1970s.  Robert insists on it as an essay or interrogation attentive to the role of the "socio-cultural" in art since t

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.