Jesse Allarie, mixed-media, chez Café Shaika, January 2007

Would it be unreasonable to draw a parallel between modernism’s almost recklessly-accelerated quest for innovation -- a quest culminating in the ‘reductivist’ visual excesses of Abstract-Expressionism or Minimalism -- and most, recent, ultra-high-technological change, which appears to have catapulted contemporary, western culture far- and blindsightedly- ‘ahead’ of any ideological centre? Arguably, both ‘evolutions’ have led us to a point of precarious balance offering the polar oppositions of catastrophe and creation as legitimate possibilities of human destiny.

By no means is the ‘chez Shaika’ showing of young, Montreal artist, Jesse Allarie, a conscious, in-depth, reflection on these societal circumstances. On the other hand, in an outpouring of mixed-media and diverse genre, Allarie has intuitively encompassed something of the duality of a nostalgic desire to return to various aspects and values of a once ‘respectable’ modernism versus a fascination with the apparent valuelessness of high-tech overproduction. Diverse stylistically, eclectic historically, and sometimes contrary and immanent in person preoccupations, Allarie, at once, references a popularized past and a trivialized present with a combination of skills and gaucheries.



‘Chez Shaika”, a dozen +, wall-mounted compositions recycled and remarried art concepts and styles of modernism’s not-so-distant past. A rich fabric of quotations resulted from a myriad of familiar sources gave nod to artists such as Rauschenberg, Pollock, Warhol, Jenkins, Bacon, de Kooning, and Rivers, ... Indeed the underpinnings of Allarie’s most substantial suite -- the so-called REKKORDZ series -- might be read as a ‘dramatization’ of the endless seriality, intertextuality and pastiche of the late-modern era. Numerous long-play, vinyl records were drip-, splatter- , and gesture- painted, mounted on their respective album covers (similarly treated), then presented frontally, in frames of one- , four- , or nine- units. Snippets of ‘original’ album graphics and text, hummed on through a rhythm of kitschy P & D. The nine-unit, Tic-Tac-Toesque arrangements were particularly ‘vocal’ in underlining modernism’s once, cutting-edge technology [i.e. the ‘78’], reduced to no more than a ‘play’ful support for irony, witticism and / or paint.

In a similar ‘dark’ vein -- one, slightly plus-human-scale, high-tech construction -- a solitary, flat-black, monochromatically-painted assemblage of computer-age detritus, entitled HANDGUN -- stood as a sentinel in the middle of the exhibition space. It whispered of a conceptual collision between the all-neutralizing painting technique of Nevelson and the sci-fi ‘imaginings cum realities’ of H.R. Giger, and took aim at ‘meaning’ already destabilized by the impending obsolescence of even our newest technologies.



Despite a penchant to [re]present visions of cultural exhaustion, Allarie’s exuberance carries the potential for imposing a changed, aesthetic perspective onto the future. His ongoing artistic endeavours may very well prove to respond [finally] to Claes Oldenburg’s 1970 [then] ‘pivotal-time’ call “for an art that embroils everyday crap and comes out on top.”

T. L. Mtl. 2007