The luxury market is an ogre wanting to swallow whole the world of art, often digesting the creations which nevertheless believed they could escape this phagocytosis. But who could resist the seduction of money? Despite the pandemic – which was supposed to change everything, we were told – everything is back to 14! Since 2021, the market has picked up again, claim both the sites of art fairs like Art Basel or newspapers like The Art Newspaper.
Is it a coincidence? These days, when many galleries here and abroad exhibit painting — a type of art that has never lost its acclaim with the public and buyers — two exhibitions, one in a university gallery and the other in an artists’ centre, set aside the art object in order to insist on the intellectual process and, even, in a certain way, on the complex material mechanics which allow creation .
The first exhibition, at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University, focuses on drawing, which could symbolically embody a struggle against the confinement of the work of art in a very short relationship to time, to the immediacy that our contemporary world celebrates so much. There would be, in the process of the drawing staged here, not the nostalgia of an old know-how, but the possibility of investing a tool with a long temporality, for a slow creation where the final result is almost secondary .
The visitor will see works by Sarah Greig, who often creates photos of drawings that will make one think of plans, of diagrams that would allow or would have made it possible to develop objects… Like many plans, they invite you to take a moment to understand , analysis and even, sometimes, imagination. Some photos, in 2D, seem to themselves take shape in space, in 3D, the photo paper turning over at the corners. Other images of plans seem to have been cut out and already partly assembled by the artist. Greig’s photographs seem to show the very mechanics of their creation. In some works, we will recognize diagrams explaining the mechanics of the lenses of old photo cameras…
In the same exhibition, Thérèse Mastroiacovo continues a remarkable series of drawings transposing the covers of books on contemporary art. The idea of the present that these covers exacerbate is challenged by the very process of slow creation, in pencil, and over the long term, since 2005, that the artist favors. The works of Greig and Mastroiacovo will seem a strange reversal of situation compared to modern art which has greatly valued the fact of being in the present. We will remember, among other things, the famous phrase Presentness is grace by art theorist Michael Fried.
Reflective devices
The second exhibition, at the Dazibao centre, will also support this vision of art as a complex process that exists over time. This presentation revolves around an intervention in the gallery, a research notebook and a third part consisting of a publication that will be completed later. We will find there, again, the creation of Mastroiacovo, who here uses letraset, an old graphic process, and the idea of the long process of transferring the letters that it allows as a symbol of a work requiring all the concentration of the artist. The visitor will also be challenged by the intervention of Catherine Lescarbeau, working among other things around a research notebook which will evoke the method developed by the writer William S. Burroughs, who sectioned his writings in order to restructure them in a way innovative and confusing. Lescarbeau used the outline of a methodology course for the doctorate in the study and practice of the arts. She cut out every word and then created collages. The statements are sometimes critical, sometimes absurd. The collage method makes it possible to create a new “unexpected meaning”.
The art lover will also be challenged by the works of Stephanie Comilang and kg Guttman who, intelligently, also stage a creative process, a complex artistic and cultural dialogue with several levels of interpretation.