Notes: On the rudiments of culture II.

Death is the curator of life.

Simon Bilodeau at Art Mur.

Ce que l’on ne voit pas qui nous touche pile #1, 2014

L'arc-en-ciel n'existe pas

Montreal artist Simon Bilodeau's latest show at Art Mur is something of a culmination of many of the tendencies that have been present in his work for more than half a decade. Unlike other artists who concentrate on 'materiality', Bilodeau's is a resolutely cold sensibility devoid of any of the touchy-feely aesthetic touches that plague so much current abstract work. He constructs mausoleums, not party spaces. Bilodeau has said, Par ce choix plastique de n’utiliser aucune couleur, je consens à ne susciter aucune émotion par les couleurs utilisées, puisque celles-ci, je crois, tendraient par comparaison à prendre pour réalité ce qui est présenté. (By the choice not to use any plastic colour, I agree not to provoke any emotion by the colours used, since they, I think, tend to take compared to what is actually presented.) Which is to say, the painting (or sculpture) negates the emoticon function for the sake of the image.

Jack Bush at the National Gallery of Canada.

Pinched Orange, 1964

The 2014 Biennial was bland. Even Mario Doucette's work couldn't lift it from feeling like a recycled lump. But it isn't as though the NGC was putting it in serious competition with their major show, the Jack Bush Retrospective, co-curated by Marc Mayer and Sarah Stanners. The show is big, perhaps too much so, and impressive. It's not impressive just because it's big, thankfully, although that's usually a significant help to it. For example, when the many rooms that make up the show open up into each other, when you can stand in a position and glance one direction to another to survey years of work in either linear path, there's a kind of overwhelming impressiveness. This linearity, which is chronological, is essential to the show and the workman-like quality that it gives to Bush's works.