Cache Studio | A hidden success

Opened in 2021 in the Centre-Sud district by artist Eric Carlos Bertrand and singer-songwriter Stephanie Cambria, the Cache Studio gallery has been very successful with young emerging artists and intends to broaden its palette by creating an artistic highway between Quebec and Mexico.

Painter, author and curator, Montreal-Mexican Eric Carlos Bertrand has teamed up with his wife, singer and art history graduate Stephanie Cambria, to create a space in their building on rue Cartier both a living space, a workshop and a contemporary art exhibition space.

“We wanted to add something complementary to the art world to fill a sort of void that exists between artist-run centers and galleries,” says Eric Carlos Bertrand. With an openness to artists and without the extremely commercial approach. It worked right away, from the first exposure. And this, thanks to social networks and the desire of artists to find a certain freedom at Cache Studio. Because there is no “curatorial intervention or theoretical agenda”, he adds.

Since 2021, the gallery – which is an NPO – has presented exhibitions with promising artists such as Rosalie Gamache, Félix Hould, Laurent Le Bel-Roux or Sébastien Gaudette, and other more experienced ones such as Erik Nieminen, Etienne Zack, Susan G. Scott or the Mexican Alberto Castro Leñero. The gallery discovers artists on social networks and invites them to exhibit. Artists keep two-thirds of the sale of their works.

The other side of the gallery is the Mexican angle. Eric Carlos Bertrand has many contacts in Mexico. He plans to open a space in Mexico City to create a coming and going of artists between the two countries.

Currently, the exhibition presented in Montreal offers visibility to four women from diverse backgrounds with atypical styles, including Beth Frey, a British Columbian artist who divides her time between Montreal and Mexico City.

Beth Frey has a bountiful imagination. Her reputation has been steadily growing for six months as she began to create daily works using the DALL-E system, from the artificial reasoning company OpenAI. This system allows him to concoct realistic, eccentric or fantastic scenarios using artificial intelligence and natural language. This very original art – which sometimes recalls the style of the puppet show – is broadcast on one of his Instagram accounts, @sentientmuppetfactory.

At Cache Studio, she presents other facets of her art. We really liked his colorful watercolors filled with humor and reminiscent of rebellious comic strips, without speech bubbles or boxes. The video performance broadcast on a screen and created from photos of watercolors and the artist’s gestures seemed less attractive to us than his images produced with artificial intelligence.

Living in Montreal for 12 years, Grace Kalyta is originally from Winnipeg and is studying at Concordia. Its neat aesthetic borrows from classical or rococo decorative styles to develop a pictorial critique of “the kitsch universe of the Midwestern suburbs”.

Its crystal chandelier, very Renaissance, or its vase of the Marquise de Pompadour evoke the elegance and excellence of artists and craftsmen of yesteryear as well as our desire to have access to the same standard… without paying too much . A fairly successful approach to the social role of works of art.

Torontonian Paula McLean, who studied at Concordia and Waterloo, traveled to Montreal to hang five of her works, wall sculptures made from resin molds and which each time express the artist’s personal stories. For example, his taste for a painting of Saint Veronica, the patroness of photographers and, in general, of representation. Or his attraction for philosophers who have tackled the theme of the image, in particular Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes.

Finally, the Swiss Xénia Lucie Laffely has been living in Montreal for four years. Having studied in the field of textiles, she creates autofiction paintings made of padded fabrics on which she prints her digital painting. Very contemporary creations with volumes of the most beautiful effect.

His creation Should I Pierce my Nipples?, made in Newfoundland and Labrador, speaks of the banality of everyday life and intimacy, with this woman’s breast covered with small drawings and a chain linking a piercing of the right nipple to the wall of the gallery! To have !