Nicolas Grenier, Patrick Bérubé and Jean-Robert Drouillard.

Three more shows from a recent trip to Montreal.

Grenier, Take Care Pt. 2

The landscaping of implosion

For the past few years, Nicolas Grenier has been painting the landscapes of planned communities in a sickly infrared glow. "Proximités," his latest show at Art Mur, caustically displays the compartmentalized lives of the increasingly fragmentary classes and the murky ideological divide between them. He manages to render the social implosion currently taking place with an aesthetic depersonalization and clarity which is rare.

The Emoticon: Reflections on a Current Trend.

Braden Labonté

This essay examines a handful of exhibitions in Montréal and Toronto that included the works of several dozen artists. In many respects, it is a kind of sequel to the earlier articles, Softcore Modernism In Toronto and Primitve Glamour. Like those articles, it's a tad sketchy, but that happens when attempting to make a point, however simple, about something rather broad. And like those articles, it examines a current which is running through the work of many young artists in two of Canada's major cities. For the sake of simplicity, I've relegated myself to those who are involved in the least subtle of ways.

Diana Thorneycroft: A People's History at Art Mur.

The past decade has seen photographer Diana Thorneycroft delving into the icons of Canadiana. Her shows travel the country and have even popped up in Paris at the Canadian Cultural Institute as "Caustic Landscapes of Canadian Imaginary." The tableaux she creates feature everything from the Group of Seven to the Trailer Park Boys and Don Cherry, generally engaging in brutal acts which parody the sensibilities of Breughel and Mack Sennett. While the souvenir shop items which populate her pictures don't exactly make up the Canadian psyche, they're a big part of how we package and sell ourselves to the world. Rather than retread the imaginary, in her new series she digs through the more literal history of the country. It's certainly not the popular history of Canada – a country that is world renowned for its hockey and maple syrup, but equally for its kiddie porn. Aside from our massive pillaging of natural resources and export of comedians, those are our essential cultural products.

Révélations - Patrick Beaulieu

Landscape work has always unnerved me. That may have a lot to do with growing up in the countryside. Out there, there is a real violence to vision which doesn't exist in the doldrums of urbania. This rarely comes through in landscape work, that most hallowed of Canadian genres. When it does, it is most often found in either alienation, or a kind of menace. It is the latter which is clearly on display in the works of Patrick Beaulieu currently being displayed at ArtMur.

Morbid Nature

Blatherwick, Hay and King at Art Mur

The three collections by these very different artists were thematically united by their attempts to examine death in nature and the nature of death. Each approached this morbidity in a unique manner but all were united in making clear that death and the forms of nature were so intimately entwined that nature essentially is what gives death form. Beyond that, there is only surface.