Extreme Painting

Over the last few years, a new manner of figurative painting—visceral, knowingly banal or aggressively two-fisted, deeply ambivalent about the lightness of the virtual and hostile to the opinion that figurative painting is dead—has emerged in galleries from Toronto and Montreal to New York, Berlin and beyond. If the tendency has been scantily noticed by Canadian critics and gallery-goers to date, that could change abruptly this summer, when a galaxy of shows presenting this radical art opens in Montreal.