Playlist, Exhibition view. Courtesy the artists and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal. Photo: Caroline Cloutier
Playlist
galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal
14 June – 26 July 2014
Review by Cécilia Bracmort
On June 14th, galerie antoine ertaskiran opened its self-curated summer exhibition, Playlist, featuring five Montreal-based individual and collective artists. The show brings together a varied selection of techniques, styles and even experiences – from mid-career professionals to promising art students – to realize a striking layout of artists-collectors, using processes of collage and assemblage to accurately reflect the title of this show. Creative hybridizations such as Philippe Caron Lefebvre’s Caméléon Echinoidea mix morphologies of plants, animals and humans to produce fascinating creatures, aggressive as they are beautiful. His jelly-like chimeras parade elaborate mechanisms of defense while stylistically merging earthenware crafts, industrial techniques and new age iridescent paint, to duly note Caron Lefebvre’s proficiency as a naturalist.
Philippe Caron Lefebvre, Caméléon Echinoidea, 2014. Earthenware, glaze, iridescent paint. Courtesy the artist and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal. Photo: Caroline Cloutier
Mainly through the medium of textile, Concordia MFA student Les Ramsey create new meanings out of everyday objects. Accordingly Snow Bird questions the limits of painting without splattering a single drop of paint; sewing blue denim and other wool pieces as background for a huge towel, cut in the shape of a coconut tree. The accumulation of flat objects in Danger Stranger somewhat betray Rauschenberg’s influence, but go further with unorthodox methods of applying paint, like seemingly bouncing a colour-soaked basket ball on the canvas or using tie dye technique, enabling us to re-trace the different image-making processes of the final works. Further proving the über-importance of images, artist duo Doyon-Rivet presents four works bathing in the consumerist world of social networks and advertising. Their quasi-surrealist superposition of images, graphics and letters create a code as difficult to decipher as it is mesmerizing. In one such instance, Doyon-Rivet bring together Pink Floyd’s sleeve art, a slice of pizza, a Hollywood-style star shape and a steering wheel with the trio of letters making up this work’s titles (BFF – Best Friends Forever), layering multiple generations of pop-culture onto a single frame.
Interestingly, Playlist manages to survey a vast inventory of contemporary images and signs, without however challenging much of the formalism of Modern Art. Indeed, the work on display do ironically perform a delicate balance between the canons of Modernism, kitsch and faux-classicism. Nevertheless, whether these seductive strategies of detournement on show at galerie antoine ertaskiran are unraveling more than an eternal return to familiar image designs is open for debate.
Cécilia Bracmort is a writer based in Montréal
Doyon-Rivest, BFF, 2014, inkjet on paper, vynil cut. Courtesy the artists and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal. Photo: Caroline Cloutier
Playlist, Exhibition view (Doyon-Rivest). Courtesy the artists and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal. Photo: Caroline Cloutier
Playlist, Exhibition view. Courtesy the artists and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal. Photo: Caroline Cloutier
Playlist, Exhibition view. Courtesy the artists and galerie antoine ertaskiran, montréal. Photo: Caroline Cloutier
Playlist
Philippe Caron Lefebvre
Doyon-Rivest
Dominique Pétrin
Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf
Les Ramsay
14 June – 26 July 2014
galerie antoine ertaskiran
1892 rue Payette
Montreal, QC
H3J 1P3
galerieantoineertaskiran.com
Opening hours (summer hours)
Wednesday – Saturday: 11h00 – 17h00
and by appointment