L’Abstraction: Contrasting Points of View
Installation view of “L’Abstraction: des points de vue” at Galerie Lilian Rodriguez. From left: a Lise Boisseau, a Geneviève Rocher, and two François Simard works / photo François Lacasse
As survey exhibitions like the Quebec Triennial and the RBC Canadian Painting Competition have made clear, art production in Quebec over the past few years has been characterized by tensions between a controlled kind of formal minimalism and a more-is-more aesthetic of assemblage and visual cacophony. From Stéphane La Rue’s restrained monochromatic paintings and Isabelle Hayeur’s flawless photomontages to Etienne Zack’s crowded surrealist canvases and Tricia Middleton’s messy and shimmering installations, Quebec is home to a rich variety of approaches to artmaking.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the latest exhibition at Montreal’s Galerie Lilian Rodriguez, aimed at showcasing painterly approaches to abstraction, is characterized by diversity rather than similarity. Titled “L’Abstraction: des points de vue,” the group show brings together works by six painters that employ abstraction as a way of looking at and representing the world around them. Riffing on the legacy of the Quebec-based Automatistes, this younger generation of artists draws parallels between the forms that structure visual codes of abstraction and those that structure everyday types of visualization, like building blueprints and biological diagrams of cell division.
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Geneviève Rocher La sauterelle 2008 / photo Richard-Max Tremblay |
Multimedia artist Geneviève Rocher, for instance, uses newsprint from publications like the New York Times Review of Books to create a series of colourful geometric collages. Playfully using insect names and French idioms in titles such as La sauterelle and Pas folle la guêpe, Rocher’s basic geometric patterns draw attention to the way that simple shapes form building blocks for both complex languages and biological organisms. Meanwhile, Luce Meunier’s recent paintings place sparse, minimalist cubes of ground, recycled paint on untreated linen. The most restrained work the artist has produced to date, Meunier’s paintings recall the monochromatic canvases of Mark Rothko, but also resemble floor plans of underused domestic spaces like balconies and garages.
Rounded out by the work of Lise Boisseau, Dan Brault, François Simard and Justin Stephens, “L’Abstraction” pays tribute to the lasting influence of abstraction in Quebec’s multipolar art world. (372 rue Ste-Catherine O #405, Montreal QC)
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Luce Meunier Balcon #2 2008 / photo Raja Ouali |
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