David Lafrance, Trevor Gould, Alain Paiement

The three Montreal-based artists gathered together in an exhibition at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal’s Belgo Building this spring resist easy overlap. It’s a block party of sorts, an assemblage of disparate voices unified by an attention to the effects of temporal and geographic location. David Lafrance recalled the tactile, visceral joy of day-to-day life in the city, with object-like paintings and craft-like objects that speak to the surprise and necessity of urban life. Trevor Gould held up mirrors with startling portraits of apes that restage, for the viewer, a troubling encounter with modernity. And Alain Paiement’s digital prints of lunar phases offered pristine surfaces, as smooth as the moon is pocked, that tracked shifts in perception and marked the contingencies of embodied vision.

Different mediums, different moods. But in each lay a ballad of, and to the local. Here, where you stand in the picture counts—and meaning and matter resound through time, space and place. Take, for example, the work of Lafrance, represented via two installations and five paintings. Octogone, 2012–13, rehearses a classic urban street scene with particular Montreal flourish: a sidewalk planter box hosts an urban garden where hockey sticks support shrubbery, tulips grow alongside cigarette butts and pizza slices, a whiskey bottle stands by an abandoned tape deck. All of it rendered in roughly hewn wood—imagine the results if Barney Rubble took up carpentry, only this is more fun. It’s Montreal vernacular, with Brechtian logic: the DIY energy, the compositional anarchy, and a folk art that insists on familiarity and surprise, pleasure and critique.

I spent a long time looking at Pas de voisins, 2013, a canvas bound by a painted black frame. At its centre, an oblong shape opens on a wild garden scene wherein small plants overtake footpaths and unruly terrain includes a vase, a hat, a gun. Elsewhere, a raw steak hovers—or is it a disembodied eye? The details draw you in, literally compelling proximity. But when I looked back from across the room, I saw instead a vintage TV and cracked up. Part smokescreen, part screen memory, the trompe-l’oeil effect marks the status of the art object as consumer product and the TV as cultural artifact. If Lafrance uses distance and the play of a mobile viewer to transmit information of an entirely different order, nearness holds equal power in a carnival of detail that challenges the nature/culture divide.

Another painting, Drogues et alcools, 2013, pulled my chain in similar ways. Taking a subject more often dulled by sentiment, morality or glamour, Lafrance instead leaves us hanging, envisioning two shapes—the body?—set against a field of green that descends to near-black. One shape is a black triangle, a nose at 45 degrees, ornamented with botanical imagery; the other, a flesh-toned hive, part brain, part torso. From the base of each, he paints strands of pearl chains that drop into space, then curve upward, leading nowhere. Mixing dread and beauty through an uncanny sense of recognition, Lafrance conveys the boundless, altered states offered up through the body—let loose by and through material need—Antonin Artaud’s body without organs?

What’s at stake for me here, and arguably with all the work on view, is the presence of the body as historical object in and before the work. God’s Window, 2012, a polyptych of portraits by Gould, conveys the expressive physiognomy of the ape, whose frontal gaze is both iconic and difficult to meet. In one image, the detail of a Klan-like figure situates our looking within the racist legacy of colonialism, insisting on an historical context that mocks the notion of scientific progress. With the series “Doubles lunes,” 2012, Paiement pulled against synchrony, reworking into a single image discrete images of the moon taken at different times and places. Traces of movement, shifts in colour convey the difference—wherein perception derives from the particularities of an individual moving body situated in time and space.

Where you stand counts. Leaving the Belgo, that expansive industrial walk-up built in the 19th century, made alive with artists’ labour and the aromatics of paint and mildew, I kept thinking about Lafrance’s neo-folk attitude, and the rear-view window more broadly proposed by folklore. And I remembered that—before its more sinister appropriations on behalf of multiple, nation-building projects—folk simply meant people: standing, walking, making things. ❚

“Trevor Gould, David Lafrance, Alain Paiement” was exhibited at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal, from April 13 to May 17, 2013.

MJ Thompson is a writer living in Brooklyn and Montreal. She is an assistant professor in the department of Fine Arts at Concordia University.