Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran
Montréal
October 15—
December 6, 2014

“A profound dissonance” is how Giorgio Agamben explains the condition of being contemporary. He continues: “the contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness.” ¹ In a lecture at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis in relation to his first solo exhibition in an American Museum last summer, the Canadian artist Jon Rafman explained that by looking at the dismal side of the world, he hopes to reveal some fundamental truths about the profound values of society.² Rafman’s HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL II presented last fall at galerie antoine ertaskiran was a statement about contemporaneity in that the artist looked at the virtual world to convey a portrait of today’s society.

In the first room of the gallery, the artist presented a number of sculptures from the series Manifold. At first glance, the sculptures’ flowing forms and shapes recall some of the greatest works in art history – from Umberto Boccioni’s Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio to some of Constantin Brâncuşi’s sculptures. Unlike Boccioni or Brâncuşi however, Rafman used 3D printing technology to make preliminary structures that he subsequently covered with materials such as deep-coloured pigments, gold leaf, aluminum powder, concrete and even stainless steel paint. Comparable to his previous sculptural series, New Age Demanded, for which Rafman altered sculptural models to the point of being

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