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Review: Berlinde De Bruyckere – The poetic beauty of ephemeral existence

Currently on view: Montréal
Berlinde De Bruyckere
at DHC/ART, Montréal
30 June – 13 November 2011

“Les Deux” (2007) Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin

The air is somber and solemn at DHC/ART gallery, where life-size sculptures of human and equestrian carcasses are lugubriously arranged in a clinically white exhibition. An unsettling sense of disquiet has taken over the space, as if we have just witnessed the inexorable reality of a public execution. Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere uses the physical body as a vessel, a receptacle to endure violence, pain, suffering and ultimately death, the body as a theater that lays bare the trials of our human condition.

“Les Deux” (2001) displaces the gallery into a veterinary morgue, in laying out two sculptures of full-grown horses on a purpose-built scaffold. These ostensibly simulate real animals, such that one expects the stench of fresh road-kill to arise. Not quite real, however these were cast from actual corpses and subsequently covered with genuine hides and manes, hand stitched together. The equine faces are featureless, eyes, nostrils and mouth have been sown shut, to accentuate our perception of an enormous lifeless mass. Throughout the ages, horses have symbolized power, glory, strength and freedom, the noble beast long ago domesticated by humans has served in as many campaigns for civilization, as for pillage and war. Now channeled through De Bruyckere’s vision, the horse has become an emblem for the aftermath of powerlessness and desolation.
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Review: John Currin – Controversial ambitions of a master painter

Currently on view: Montréal
John Currin
at DHC/ART, Montréal
30 June – 13 November 2011

“Sno-bo” (1999) © John Currin. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

DHC/ART premiered John Currin with a first retrospective exhibition in Montréal for the American painter. Looking back at the last two decades of his works, displayed chronologically from the lowest level up to the top forth floor of the DHC/ART building, Currin has evolved from somewhat naïve painterly techniques to more recent attempts to rival old-master virtuosities, via provocative erotic themes. Willingly putting high and low brow genres into conflict, he is well known for painting women with disproportionally large breasts, tiny feet and padded bottoms. Currin appropriates kitsch and other popular forms of imagery from mass media consumer culture, to entangle their mercantile origins with satire, caricature, fiction and fantasy. These surprisingly modest-sized canvases also overflow with art historical reference that somehow add gravitas to evermore prodigal pictorial effects, in high contrast to his deliberate choice of shallow subject matter, trespassing on ideas beauty and desire.
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Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal

The 12th edition of “Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal”
Lucidity – Inward Views
8 September – 9 October 2011
moisdelaphoto.com


Already at its 12th edition, “Le Mois de la Photo à Montreal” is opening its doors to the general public from 8 September until 9 October, and this time around a total of 14 different venues across the city will host the event. Over the last two decades, this international biennale has explored the issues of the photographic image in contemporary art as well as in wider contexts, and how these have transformed today’s socio-cultural climate. This year guest curator Anne-Marie Ninacs has invited 25 artists from all over the world, to contribute to the theme of Lucidity – Inward Views.

The theme underlines photography’s ability, in the hands of many artists, to address complex geopolitical situations and confront painful human drama squarely in its face. Nevertheless, Ninacs pushes forward in her curatorial statement, urge us more than ever to examine, as a society, the forces interacting at the root of these phenomena. In unfolding the many-layered vectors of conflict, the hope consist in attaining a measured inner clarity, a “transparence of mind,” which is the present-day psychological equivalent of lucidity. Continue reading “Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal”

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Review: Pierrick Sorin “Une vie bien remplie”

Currently on view: Montréal
Pierrick Sorin: Une vie bien remplie
at Great Hall, Darling Foundry
16 June – 28 August 2011

Pierrick Sorin “C’est mignon tout ça” (1993) short film 4 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Darling Foundry

Une Vie Bien Remplie is a collection of works by French videographer Pierrick Sorin, currently at the Darling Foundry. The six pieces on show form a comprehensive twenty-year overview of the artist’s career, spanning most of his thematic realm. Sorin reaches high levels of self-contemplation with each of his films and videos in order to subvert his own artistic relevance and project the buoyancy of his humor, which fluctuates between subtlety and satire.

With “C’est mignon tout ça” (1993) for example, Sorin films himself on all fours in garter belt, high heels and stockings, fondling a monitor inches from his face which is broadcasting a live feed of his own behind. The mise en scène is overdubbed and inter-spliced with a closely-shot interview of our self-portraitist, confessing his difficulties at overcoming shyness and creating meaningful relationships with others. If nothing else, this first piece illustrates the extent to which Sorin uses the versatility of video to comment on this medium of tele-presence that separates as much as unites its protagonists with the rest of the world.
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Review: Showing Stuff in a Big Room

Mathieu Lefevre: Showing Stuff in a Big Room
at Galerie Division, Montréal
25 June – 31 July 2011

Mathieu Lefevre “Face Plant” (2011) oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Division

Mathieu Lefevre at Galerie Division is effectively “Showing Stuff in a Big Room“. Whereas unpretentious exhibition titles often suggest modesty in the artist, Lefevre is putting some big cards on the table, playing against the plausibly inescapable boundaries of conceptual art. This show claims a much wider appeal than the usual art world’s initiated few, fighting conceptual dreariness with the weapon of humor.

Nearly all clustered on a single wall of Division’s main space, the works range form classic tableaux to three-dimensional painting-sculptures. By way of over-crowding Lefevre seemingly instills some sort of democracy amongst his works. Taken individually, each art object is as painfully entitled as a dated comedy club one-liner: a large black canvas, covered in feathers (“Tarred and Feathered”); a swath of white paint on a bare canvas, on which is penciled less is more (“More or Less”); an indistinct shape protruding into an unpainted, stretched canvas (“Trash Can Disguised as Contemporary Art”). The literal and figurative collide in many of his works to illustrate commonly known ideas in art, and thus reach a second level of understanding, which does question how many of a wider audience will ultimately “get it”.
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Review: Sculpture – Ludisme

Currently on view: Montréal
Sculpture – Ludisme at Galerie SAS
9 June – 13 August 2011

Patrick Bérubé “Lies” (2010) Wood, Plexiglas, water jet cutting, clay and plant. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie SAS

Derived from the Latin verb ludere, to play, Galerie Sas has appropriately titled its current exhibition of three-dimensional works. Sculpture-Ludisme assembles art pieces by Patrick Bérubé, Catherine Bolduc, Éric Cardinal, Laurent Craste, Marc Dulude, Peter Gnass, Fred Laforge and Karine Payette in this playful, surreal and wildly chromatic show that comfortably straddles the line between serious and over-the-top. While all the works genuinely represent the approach of each artist, overall this show is delightfully coherent.

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Review: Parisian Laundry’s New Post-New summer show

Currently on view: Montréal
Summertime In Paris at Parisian Laundry
23 June – 30 July 2011

Luc Paradis “Stick Out There” (2010) oil on canvas, 60 x 84”. Courtesy of the artist and Parisian Laundry

Parisian Laundry is now showing its annual summer exhibition entitled “Summertime In Paris”, double Dutch busted with generous servings of themes: “Kindling” and “Post-New”. Five artists from Canada and America have been selected this way to spark a fire from beyond the realms of novelty.

“New” has long been overused as an adjective and oversaturated the pages of art press releases for decades. Lost in its significance and barely identifiable, art audiences still irresistibly seek newness, almost as a reflex behavior. Parisian Laundry fuses this with an equally vacuous term to create “post-new”, a humorous neologism that perhaps will ignite the whimsical attitudes of Summertime in Paris artists.

Luc Paradis creates uncanny and fantastical scenery in his paintings, such as “Stick It Out There” (2010), its undulating mountains and valleys, coveting a factory-like building alone by the cliff of a fictional wilderness. “Pleasure Park” (2011) also depicts a fun place to go to, with the familiar theme park attractions teasing our desire to take on a ride. But the surroundings of the park are submerged in darkness, tensing up the atmosphere as if an undetected danger was about to pounce and shatter an innocent moment of glee.
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Breaking News: Aude Moreau awarded the 2011 Powerhouse Prize

Aude Moreau installs “Tapis de sucre 3” (2008) at Darling Fondry in 2008 © Aude Moreau

Last night the multidisciplinary artist was made recipient of the first edition of a yearly prize given to women from Powerhouse Gallery.

Aude Moreau is a French-born artist living and working in Montreal since the early 90s, who just recently completed her MA in Visual and Media Arts at UQAM. Moreau is also one of the recipients for this year’s Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art. From 2000 she has accumulated an impressive body of work including the installations series “Tapis de sucre” (2006/2008) and “Tirer le ciel (Shooting the Sky)” (2005–2010). The diversity of Moreau’s work also incorporates media, performance and video, often employing everyday consumer materials of ephemeral qualities. Stemming from routine experiences, her work evokes contradictory notion of loss and attainment, in confrontation with the alienating forces of culture and consumerism. So far she has exhibited in Quebec, France, USA and Luxembourg.
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Interview: Pascal Grandmaison

“One Eye Open” (2011) three-channel video HD projection. Installation view at Galerie René Blouin. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie René Blouin.

Pascal Grandmaison’s latest exhibition “Projections” is currently on view at Galerie Réne Blouin, for the inauguration of his new space on 2020 William Street, Montréal with two recent video works. A soundless three-channel HD video projection, “One Eye Open” (2011) meticulously depicts a bouquet of plastic flowers illuminated in pseudo-natural beauty, and “The Neutrality Escape” (2008) looks into the history of cinema, with another, single-channel HD video. M-Kos interviews Grandmaison about these and other projects.

M-KOS: Can you tell us a little bit about “Projections” your latest exhibition at René Blouin?

Pascal Grandmaison: The work we are seeing today is a follow up to a succession of projects I’ve done around the concept of daylight, I worked on several projects this year, I was really trying to look at the diverse facets of how we receive sunlight, how we interact with light arriving as a physical phenomenon, how light travels in space, and how it may affect us day-to-day. Continue reading “Interview: Pascal Grandmaison”

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Review: Kent Monkman “The Atelier”

Currently on view: Montréal
Kent Monkman: The Atelier
at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain
14 May – 23 June 2011

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain

“The Atelier” is Kent Monkman’s current exhibition at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, transforming the entrance of the gallery into an open artist studio, furnished with antique décor including Récamier, wall paper and thick embroidered drape curtains partially covering a theatre window. Placed at the centre of this mise en scène (although exclusively for the pleasure of those at the private view) a winged male nude poses next to an easel, canvas and used paintbrushes, piles of drawings and etchings of reference materials cluttered on the adjacent wall. Mimicking the romantic ideal of a 19th Century European studio, Monkman invokes the artist as creative genius, bastardized with contemporary paraphernalia such as a Louis Vuitton handbag and photographs of Princes William and Harry. Monkman opens the studio door for his audience to take a quick tour of the creative process in his new series of fables.
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