Montreal artist Etienne Zack benefits from closer examination. His sheer facility with paint and his appealing sense of colour have made it possible to underestimate how much Zack has on the ball (how can something so pretty be smart?), but this show sets the record straight.
The exhibition feels like a dictionary of painting, with his surfaces built up from a wide selection of mark-making styles. Sometimes evoking three-dimensional depth, at other times bringing us up nose to nose with the flatness of the picture plane, he delivers a cognitive workout as we try to sift through it all. In true modernist style, the studio is often his subject. Methods (2007), for example, depicts a pile of studio detritus sharing space with a mishmash of tiles and cubes, and a confusing flesh pile that reads like a Rubens nude put through the blender. An easel and blackboard bring up the rear of this symphony of surfaces.
Zack's dislocations keep us on our toes, updating modernism in a knowing contemporary vernacular.