Between the lines of abstraction
AMatter of Abstraction, the Musée d’art contemporain’s new permanent exhibition, is a primer on the development of the art that brought Quebec into the modern art world.
The exhibition is a history lesson that features 110 works by 60 artists.
It begins with paintings by the signatories of the 1948 Refus Global, including Paul-émile Borduas, who shares a gallery with Jean-paul Riopelle. It ranges from the spontaneous Automatistes to the Plasticians, who confined gesture within a structured framework, and continues with Yves Gaucher, Jean Mcewen and others who combined structural dynamics with gestural expressions to create a hybrid abstraction.
Finally, it looks at a younger generation of artists who have, according to curator Josée Bélisle, taken abstraction into areas that are by turns spare, engaging and conceptual.
Bélisle said she first chose the artists, and then combed the museum’s vaults to find works to represent them. For the most important artists, she chose early works “that allow you to see what they did leading up to the paintings they are best known for,” she said.
A brightly painted canvas from 1966 of a yellow and blue grid with orange lines represents Paterson Ewen, better known for paintings of natural phenomena he made by gouging lines into plywood. The painting shows that he was influenced early in his career by the geometric abstraction being developed by contemporary painters such as Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant.
Likewise, Bélisle chose to represent Molinari, better known for his explorations of colour on striped canvases, with an earlier painting (Structure) that has geometric shapes other than stripes.
There are numerous examples of monochrome paintings in the exhibition. At one end of the spectrum is the subtle Cadmium Red Deep, five joined canvases by Ulysse Comtois. The lines created by the row of canvases are echoed by barely visible lines in the painted red surfaces.
Other monochrome paintings are about the paint itself, its texture and the gesture captured in the paint. Chris Kline’s Divider No. 6 is so thinly painted and translucent that the stretcher shows through the canvas as part of the work.
Marcel Barbeau’s Twirling Retina is an example of Op Art, a form of expression that is exciting, but also challenging to look at.
The exhibition space is divided into open-ended galleries whose walls are often open between paintings, encouraging a constant dialogue between them.
Even the video installations, although in dark corners, are visible from the other works. One of them is Kelly Mark’s Porn, a recording of the flickering light on a wall from a TV showing a porn movie. “The content is totally concealed, making it (the video) about light and space,” Bélisle said.
The exhibition will be on display for four years, and is didactic in nature, according to the terms of the funding agreement with the Ministry of Culture, she said.
But two galleries of the Musée exhibition are given to temporary exhibitions of abstraction from elsewhere. A catalogue about the exhibition and abstraction in general and specific to Quebec will be published next year, she said.
A Matter of Abstraction continues until 2016 at the Musée d’art contemporain, 185 Ste. Catherine St. W. Information: macm.org.
Three solo exhibitions in private galleries are indicative of the conceptual abstraction practised by many Quebec artists in the 1950s and ’60s, as opposed to the expressive gestural abstraction made by their contemporaries in New York and Ontario.
Annie Lafleur, assistant director of Galerie Lacerte contemporain, said that in Quebec, monochrome painting focused on the edge and the line, not on the matter (the paint), the texture or the gesture.
Ron Martin, a painter from Ontario who recently won a Governor General’s Award in visual arts, is showing monochrome paintings at Lacerte. There is an overall pattern in his thickly textured paintings, but no form or shape – it’s a way of working inspired by the New York abstract expressionists, she said.
Every stroke in Martin’s Untitled Red is expressive but also precise, as if the brush never left the canvas, she said.
The New York school also influenced John Fox, a Montreal figurative painter who devoted 15 years in mid-career to abstraction, and then returned to figuration. Battat Contemporary is showing some of his abstract works, which are all about line and gesture.
Abstraction helped Fox get away from a predetermined image to take advantage of acci- dents, said Sandra Paikowsky, his wife and co-founder of the Journal of Canadian Art History. “What was important was not what to paint, but how to paint,” she said.
Andrew Smith, whose abstract paintings are on exhibit at Galerie Dominique Bouffard, sees Ewen as a role model in the making of abstract gestures.
Smith said he has gone from abstraction based on the trajectories of bees in flight to embodying the movement of the bees in what are called blind contour drawings, in which the artist looks only at the subject as he draws. By empathizing with honeybees, which are in decline, Smith said he has a conceptual framework linking the process of art making to an idea.
Ron Martin Selected Works: 1970-1980 continues until May 14 at Galerie Lacerte art contemporain, 6345 St. Laurent Blvd. Information: galerielacerte.com
John Fox: Abstractions continues until June 2 at Battat Contemporary, 7245 Alexandra St., Suite 100. Information: battatcontemporary.com
Andrew Smith: Gather and Fold continues until May 20 at Galerie Dominque Bouffard, 1000 Amherst St. Information: galeriedominquebouffard.com