Montreal
posted by Isa Tousignant - January 18th, 2007.
The blanket of snow that has finally returned Montreal to its usual status of winter wonderland seems to have had the side effect of lulling half the city’s galleries into slumber. That’s the only explanation I can think of for the quiet winter arts season. Nevertheless, there are goods to be found, like in the heart of the town’s poshest hood, Outremont, where a beautiful, airy, and light exhibition space is attached to its municipal library. The current draw to the Galerie d’art d’Outremont is the new solo show by François Morelli, a Montreal artist who’s exhibition at Joyce Yahouda last summer was among the most joyful art experiences of the year. Morelli’s practice is rooted in performance (the Yahouda show included biweekly happenings during which the artist animated masks he’d concocted out of interwoven mutlicoloured vintage belts), but here the show is composed of sculptures and works on paper. And it isn’t as new as I’d assumed: the works in this exhibition, called Parades, date back to 1999. Exemplifying an aspect of his practice he’s known for yet I’d never seen, Morelli’s stamps are made in various shapes – a tongue, a syringe, human body parts, frogs – then dipped in coloured paint and used to create scroll-shaped narratives with repeated patterns. The images in Parades are candy coloured and beautiful, dizzying in their multitudes – if not particularly probing.
Michel Herreria, from the series Les Tristes
Halfway across town in Westmount, another haute neighbourhood, a small exhibition by the Toronto-born painter David Gillanders hides within the diminutive McClure Gallery. Blind Spot groups a dozen small to medium-sized oil paintings that pay homage to memories of landscapes. The theme requires some interesting mental trickery; each work is a patchwork of vague shapes in blues, beiges, grays and teals, not painted from memory, but rather, as memories. Gillanders paints from photographs, so the paintings’ undefined quality (both formally and representationally) is the result of a conscious stylistic process of de-definition. To capture the ethereal corporeality of memories is a worthy goal, but Gillanders doesn’t quite achieve it, at least not in the paintings. The magic for me lay in the few drawings included, miniature landscapes created by drawing on layers of velum, each of which adds its part to the image’s clarity and meaning. These tiny odes to place recall the feeling of riding a train through fields, the places you’re passing inform your mood, but you’d be hard-pressed to remember any site in particular.
Max Wyse, Tlalpujahua
The season’s most sensational surprise rests within the reconfigured walls of Galerie Clark, now one big room rather than a medium and a small one, where one finds the magnificent work of France’s Michel Herreria and Montreal’s own Max Wyse. Inflorescences was programmed because of a perceived kinship between these two artists and, despite my skepticism, I must admit it’s there. Herreria’s delicate illustrations on crisp white paper with black ink pen clash completely with Wyse’s expansive, muddy-coloured paintings, but they connect in their liberty with the human form. Both speak in analogies, in symbols that are human-based but extend into creatures that express much more than any human could. In Herreria’s case, the creatures are abstracted and wryly humorous – his art made me think of an underground Sempé. With Wyse, the transformations are darker – super-extended body shapes coexist with half animal/half man figures expressed in a completely addictive stroke and palette that became truly transfixing. I woke up in the middle of a gormless reverie about why, exactly, I found these five painted works so profoundly mesmerizing, by shutting myself up with a big, “Who cares?” The explanation need not be found as long as the tingly feeling persists.
Andrée Préfontaine, Ô divine, video projection
Lastly, the Belgo is worth a visit if only for this show: Galerie B-312 presents two really fun works in the form of Éric Desmarais’s crazy clickity installation, Soigner son language and Andrée Préfontaine’s simplistically charming video work, Ô divine. Desmarais takes over the gallery’s large room with an automated universe composed of typewriters, TV screens, and about three million wires and sensors, each instructing one or other of the machines to react by moving, clicking, or even typing. The poetic results are there on paper for us to read and our presence in the space plays into the machines’ stimuli – it’s an easy way to feel important. Prefontaine, in stark contrast, presents one of the simplest images I’ve seen in video art in quite a while. Part of her Tutti frutti series, it’s simply half a strawberry, filmed from its freshest state to when it’s all dried up. The cycle is sped up to a few seconds and goes from fresh to rotten to fresh again nonstop, so that the thing becomes quite alive, like a luscious lung, hard at work or an obscenely appealing mouth opening and closing in a pulpous expression of desire. Or a vagina of quite overwhelming proportions. The accompanying treatise says something in reference to Deleuze and his conception of cinematic time, but I say pish-posh – for gawd’s sake, learn how to enjoy simple symbolism for what it is.
Isa Tousignant is the Arts and Culture Editor at Hour magazine
Galerie d’art d’Outremont: 41 St-Just, (514) 495-7419
François Morelli: Parades continues until February 4.
McClure Gallery: http://www.centredesartsvisuels.ca/e/gallery/index.php
David Gillanders: Blind Spot continues until January 27.
Galerie Clark: http://www.clarkplaza.org/
Michel Herreria and Max Wyse continue until February 17.
Galerie B-312: http://www.galerieb-312.qc.ca/
Éric Desmarais and Andrée Préfontaine continue until February 17.
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