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Wednesday 10am - 5pm Thursday 10am - 7pm Friday 10am - 5pm Saturday 11am - 5pm

http://www.durancontemporain.com/

Duran Contemporain, 372 Rue Ste-Catherine Ouest, suite 527, Montreal, QC (2026)

Q: What is the address?

372 Rue Ste-Catherine Ouest, Suite 527

06/17/2026

Left:
Bound and Becoming, 2025
Huile sur toile
40" x 30"

Right:
Tangled Intentions, 2025
Oil on canvas
40" x 30"

In this group of paintings, Daniel Itiose turns his attention away from the face, the traditional site of identity and self-representation, and toward the body as a terrain of vulnerability, desire, endurance, and control. Rendered with extraordinary technical precision, these close-cropped compositions isolate fragments of the human figure bound by vivid red rope. The artist eliminates contextual details, refusing narrative certainty in favor of psychological and emotional complexity. What remains is a confrontation between flesh and restraint, intimacy and tension.

The rope functions simultaneously as a physical object and a symbolic device. It traces the contours of the body, accentuating its volume and sensuality while also restricting its movement. This duality creates a productive ambiguity: are these figures experiencing confinement or empowerment? Submission or self-possession? Rather than presenting bo***ge as spectacle, Itiose explores how systems of control—whether social, cultural, religious, or personal—become inscribed onto the body itself. The tension of the rope mirrors the invisible pressures individuals navigate in the construction and performance of identity.

On view at the gallery until July 4.

06/12/2026

Forms & Faces

Installation views from Daniel Itiose’s debut solo exhibition at Duran Contemporain.

Born in Nigeria and based in Montréal, Itiose brings together technical virtuosity and psychological complexity in a series of new hyperrealist paintings that examine identity, desire, spirituality, vulnerability, and self-representation. Moving between intimate portraiture and fragmented depictions of the body, the works challenge fixed readings of gender, power, and beauty while foregrounding the lived experience of Black subjects.

Forms & Faces is on view until July 4, 2026 at Duran Contemporain, 372 rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, suite 527, Montréal.

📍 Exhibition continues through July 4
🎨 Artist: Daniel Itiose
📸 Installation views:

Hyperrealism PortraitPainting ContemporaryArt ArtExhibition MontrealGallery BlackPortraiture EmergingArtist

06/10/2026

Daniel Itiose
“The Gods Must Be Crazy”
2026
Oil on canvas
40” x 30”

Daniel Itiose’s The Gods Must Be Crazy (2026) reflects on the complex coexistence of Christianity and traditional African spiritual practices in contemporary Nigeria. Drawing from his own cultural experience, the artist explores how individuals often navigate between different systems of belief, embracing one or another according to circumstance, need, or conviction.

At the center of the painting, a figure confronts the viewer with a gaze partially obscured by cataracts, rendering him only partially sighted. This detail becomes a powerful metaphor for the limits of human understanding and the uncertainties that accompany faith. While physical vision is impaired, the work suggests the possibility of another form of sight rooted in intuition, spirituality, and inherited knowledge.

The floating ram’s horns, symbols of power and spiritual authority, are notably detached from the figure’s body. Neither fully possessed nor entirely absent, they evoke the fluid and evolving nature of identity and belief. Through hyperrealist precision and layered symbolism, Itiose transforms portraiture into a meditation on faith, perception, and the search for meaning.

On view at the gallery.

05/29/2026

“How to Get Nowhere Series (Lake)”
2026
Oil on panel
14” x 12”

In How to Get Nowhere Series (Lake) (2026), Aline Setton constructs an enigmatic architectural environment that exists at the threshold between physical reality and psychological space. Dominating the composition is a sculptural spiral staircase that rises without a discernible destination, its elegant curvature suspended within an open structure overlooking a tranquil lake and distant mountains. The staircase functions as both an architectural element and a symbolic device, evoking notions of aspiration, movement, and perpetual transition. By isolating this form within an otherwise sparse environment, Setton transforms a familiar architectural feature into a metaphysical proposition, inviting viewers to consider the relationship between movement and stasis, progress and futility. The title itself introduces a subtle paradox, suggesting a journey whose purpose lies not in arrival but in the experience of navigation and uncertainty.

Setton’s painting practice frequently engages with the language of modernist architecture, appropriating its vocabulary of clean lines, geometric order, and rational design while simultaneously destabilizing its promises of coherence and control. In this work, the staircase becomes a conduit between interior and exterior space, linking the constructed environment to the expansive landscape beyond. Yet the relationship between these domains remains unresolved. The distant mountains and reflective waters evoke the sublime traditions of landscape painting, while the sharply defined architectural forms assert the logic of human intervention. Rather than allowing one to dominate the other, Setton orchestrates a productive tension between nature and construction, creating a space where perception oscillates between material certainty and dreamlike ambiguity. The carefully calibrated palette of cool blues, muted greys, and earthy tones further reinforces this atmosphere of contemplative suspension.

05/22/2026

Paul Béliveau’s Autodaphé ###III, 2025, operates within the artist’s long-standing investigation into the symbolic and historical life of books, images, and systems of knowledge. Suspended against a deep black ground, the composition stages a striking encounter between preservation and destruction. Charred and deteriorating volumes lean precariously beside a pristine book, The Great Wave of Chaos, whose reference to Hokusai’s iconic image introduces notions of instability, rupture, and cyclical upheaval. Béliveau transforms the still life tradition into a meditation on cultural memory, where books cease to function as passive objects and instead become witnesses to the fragility of civilization itself.

The tension between material decay and intellectual endurance is central to the work’s emotional and conceptual force. Burnt spines, warped pages, and damaged bindings evoke histories of censorship, conflict, and loss, while the surviving texts suggest the persistence of thought beyond catastrophe. Béliveau’s meticulous realism heightens this ambiguity. Every surface is rendered with extraordinary precision, yet the painting ultimately resists simple illusionism in favor of a broader philosophical reflection on transmission, disappearance, and resilience. In this work, the library becomes both archive and ruin, a space where beauty and destruction coexist in precarious balance.

Autodaphé###III
2025
Acrylic on canvas
30” x 48”

05/15/2026

Installed across the gallery as a dispersed sequence of intimate images, Megan Wade-Darragh’s Technicolor Afterimages transforms the exhibition space into an environment of visual suspension and perceptual instability. The small-scale paintings, each measuring 10 x 8 inches, resist the monumentality often associated with contemporary painting and instead invite a slower, more attentive form of looking. Distributed rhythmically along the walls, the works unfold less as isolated objects than as fragments within a larger temporal and atmospheric field, echoing the fragmented logic of cinematic sequencing and mediated memory.

The installation emphasizes the unstable condition of the image itself. Blurred chromatic passages, spectral traces, and partially obscured forms appear to oscillate between emergence and disappearance, as though the paintings were caught in the process of materializing or dissolving before the viewer’s eyes. Their luminous surfaces recall degraded film stills, digital glitches, and corrupted transmissions, foregrounding the ways contemporary images circulate, deteriorate, and persist. In this context, the gallery becomes a space where memory is experienced not as stable recollection, but as continual reconstruction shaped by repetition, interruption, and technological mediation.

The inclusion of the film projector within the installation further complicates the relationship between image, apparatus, and perception. Positioned in dialogue with the paintings, this objects evoke systems of projection, transmission, and image production, emphasizing the material infrastructures that underlie visual culture. Rather than functioning as supplementary components, they extend the exhibition’s investigation into the spectral life of images and the unstable boundaries between analogue and digital experience. Together, the works construct an environment where perception becomes durational and contingent, inviting viewers to encounter the image as something perpetually shifting, eroding, and reforming through time.

📸

05/08/2026

Duran Contemporain is pleased to present Technicolor Afterimages, a solo exhibition by Megan Wade-Darragh, opening May 14 from 5 pm to 8 pm in the presence of the artist.

Working from fragmented film stills and digitally mediated imagery, Wade-Darragh explores the image as a site of erosion, instability, and transformation. Layers of acrylic and oil dissolve representation into luminous traces, blurred forms, and fractured surfaces that hover between appearance and disappearance. Influenced by theories of spectrality and Roland Barthes’ notion of the “filmic,” these paintings approach memory not as a fixed archive, but as a mutable process shaped by repetition, degradation, and reconstruction.

Megan Wade-Darragh
Technicolor Afterimages
May 14 – June 6
Duran Contemporain

All works: acrylic and oil on wood panel, 10 x 8 inches.

_____

Duran Contemporain a le plaisir de présenter Technicolor Afterimages, une exposition solo de Megan Wade-Darragh, dont le vernissage aura lieu le 14 mai de 17 h à 20 h en présence de l’artiste.

À partir d’images fixes fragmentées issues du cinéma et de dispositifs numériques, Wade-Darragh explore l’image comme un lieu d’érosion, d’instabilité et de transformation. Les couches d’acrylique et d’huile dissolvent la représentation en traces lumineuses, formes brouillées et surfaces fragmentées qui oscillent entre apparition et disparition. Influencées par les théories de la spectralité ainsi que par la notion de « filmique » développée par Roland Barthes, ces peintures envisagent la mémoire non comme une archive fixe, mais comme un processus mouvant façonné par la répétition, la dégradation et la reconstruction.

Megan Wade-Darragh
Technicolor Afterimages
14 mai – 6 juin
Duran Contemporain

05/02/2026

Megan Wade-Darragh
Candelabrum
2023
Oil on panel
16" x 12"

In Candelabrum (2023), Megan Wade-Darragh condenses her sustained inquiry into the image as a haunted and unstable object. The composition centers on a glowing candelabrum whose vertical axis anchors the painting while simultaneously dissolving into a haze of diffused light. Around it, a figure appears suspended, caught between emergence and disintegration. The body is neither fully present nor fully absent. It flickers, as though extracted from a degraded film still, its contours softened by painterly interruptions and veiled chromatic shifts.

The work resists a fixed narrative and instead operates through affective residue. The image does not refer back to a singular source but unfolds forward, shaped by processes of erosion and transformation. Wade-Darragh draws on the logic of the cinematic fragment, where motion is arrested yet continues to reverberate through the instability of the still. The candelabrum, traditionally a symbol of illumination, becomes here a conduit for entropy. Its light does not clarify but disperses, activating a field in which forms collapse into one another.

Materially, the painting foregrounds surface as a site of temporal accumulation. Layers of oil create a stratified image in which traces of previous states remain partially visible, suggesting an archaeology of becoming rather than a resolved composition. The figure’s fragmentation and the surrounding atmospheric distortions evoke the persistence of memory as a mutable process. In this space, perception falters and materiality takes precedence. The painting holds together multiple temporalities, allowing past and present to permeate one another. Candelabrum thus situates itself in a charged interval where the image is continually remade through decay, repetition, and painterly reconstruction.

Exhibition Megan Wade-Darragh, May 14 - June 6

04/30/2026

La galerie Duran Contemporain a le plaisir d’accueillir le lancement de l’ouvrage Un art polyphonique de Paul Béliveau. Cette publication propose un regard approfondi sur plus de cinquante années de création, mettant en lumière une pratique où les thèmes, les images et les références dialoguent dans une construction visuelle complexe et rigoureuse. L’événement se tiendra en présence de l’artiste, offrant une occasion privilégiée de rencontre, d’échange et de signature autour de ce livre qui constitue une contribution importante à la compréhension de son œuvre.
***
Duran Contemporain is pleased to host the launch of Polyphonic Art, a new publication by Paul Béliveau. The book offers an in-depth perspective on more than five decades of artistic production, highlighting a practice in which themes, images, and references engage in a sustained visual dialogue. The event will take place in the presence of the artist, providing a valuable opportunity for conversation and book signing around a publication that represents a significant contribution to the understanding of his work.

04/24/2026

Nick Doyle
"bathing in your cold light"
2022
Collage with pigmented cotton paper
35.75" x 36.50"
Edition 27 of 35, 10AP
Published by Pace Editions

Nick Doyle’s bathing in your cold light (2022) operates through a precise visual economy, reducing familiar domestic fixtures to a flattened, almost diagrammatic field. The electrical outlet and switch, rendered in a monochromatic blue palette, are both immediately recognizable and subtly estranged. By eliminating chromatic variation and emphasizing shallow relief, Doyle suppresses their utilitarian context and repositions them as formal elements. The composition hinges on balance and spacing, where screws, plates, and apertures become compositional anchors. Light, suggested through soft shadows and tonal shifts, appears less as illumination than as a conceptual condition, a “cold” presence that defines edges and volumes without warmth or narrative.

The work’s tension lies in its oscillation between intimacy and detachment. These are objects encountered daily, touched without thought, yet here they are immobilized and aestheticized, inviting prolonged attention. The title introduces a poetic register that contrasts with the austerity of the imagery, suggesting exposure, vulnerability, or even dependence on an impersonal source of energy. Doyle’s collage practice thus engages a broader reflection on infrastructure and perception, where the mechanisms that sustain contemporary life remain largely invisible until isolated and reframed. In this controlled visual environment, the ordinary is not elevated but recalibrated, prompting a reconsideration of how we inhabit and overlook the systems that surround us.

Duran Contemporain

06/17/2026

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Wednesday	10am - 5pm
Thursday	10am - 7pm
Friday	10am - 5pm
Saturday	11am - 5pm