A little retro tint vibrates inside the Belgo building (372, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest), and in particular at the 3and and 4and floors of this building, which remains, despite everything, a staple of contemporary art in Montreal. In three exhibitions, all at the end of the course, it should be specified, yesterday and today merge, collide. One of them is carried by sculpture (and the material of the 1980s), a second by painting (and the formalism of the 1960s) and the third by photography (and the black and white of the 1970s). Overview.
Marie-France Brière: getting out of the marble
At the Skol centre, Marie-France Brière proposes what some could appropriately describe as a sculpture garden: the room is occupied by four or five massive ensembles, without being monumental. We stroll around them with the impression of visiting works of a certain age.
Known more for her works of public art than for her gallery exhibitions (in her curriculum, the former are twice as numerous as the latter), the artist has been active since the 1980s. a long time in Italy, whence she had returned with blocks of white Carrara marble. His signature has since been inseparable from the prestigious rock.
However, in the era of the Anthropocene, marble is a kind of time bomb, as its extraction weakens the planet. Titles of works (Erratic blocks, Esker) are also reminiscent of natural phenomena linked to the transformation of the landscape. In this exhibition evoking austerity, Marie-France Brière makes the once noble material the symbol of a voracious economic and political system. The marble, so pure, so smooth, so solid, no longer touches the ground, almost immaterial. It is placed in rupture rather than in symbiosis with the other materials.
On one wall, a series of words completes this exhibition in which great certainties do not exist. Manufacture, permanence, erosion… Photographed like funerary plaques, these terms that one might associate with sculpture also seem to have lost their authority.
Barry Allikas: freedom from constraint
To consider that restrictions, sanitary or not, deprive of freedom, as hailed by a certain caravan in the heart of winter, is a point of view that the artist Barry Allikas does not share. His own constraint, a surface to be painted, is a source of creativity, which is reflected in the exhibition at the McBride Contemporain gallery. Add to this spatial limit, the weight of the history of geometric abstraction, then the confinement imposed in times of pandemic, and you have an astonishing set of paintings made in 2021 and 2022.
Barry Allikas has abandoned the more organic painting that he had made his own and offers more rigid compositions, carried by the repetition of vertical stripes and the alternation of colors. Like a Guido Molinari and a whole tradition of hard edge.
The tension is evident between the content and the container. Painting in 2022 is a constant quest for meaning. We can see what we want in these canvases, the bars of a prison or a superposition of squares, but can an abstract painter avoid doing representation, repainting abstraction?
The freedom of the artist, like that of the eyes that look at his works, fortunately has no limits. Much more than a matter of evolution, the history of painting is a story of twists and turns. At 70, daring, Barry Allikas takes advantage of it.
Lynne Cohen: back to her beginnings
A cherished figure of color photography through which she lingered to reveal large institutional spaces, Lynne Cohen (1944-2014) produced, in her first years of practice, more intimate images. This is what emerges from the reunion offered by the Laroche/Joncas gallery.
In 14 black and white photographs, small formats and the lens turned towards private spaces, this return to the 1970s is akin to a dive into the artist’s studio. We are in front of the premises of a work called to develop, with, already, the great parameters: strong architectural lines, very singular furniture, eccentric decorations and this tenor vintage which will make the Cohen signature.
Led by Andrew Lugg, responsible for the artist’s estate, the selection of images mainly includes prints from the period. Far from being a fire sale, the exhibition is in line with the great interest that art currently has in archives. These early works by Lynne Cohen, produced when color was not yet a welcome approach in photography, are therefore little gems born in a developing laboratory. They invite us, like this electrical outlet photographed on a bare wall, to return to gasoline.