Here is a peek of Mr

Here is a peek of Mr. Mark Laliberte's interface on his website:

- At around 5pm, I head out for a late-in-the-game visit to Montreal outsider-artist/math teacher Daniel Erban's cavernous studio space; this underground bunker is extremely large but somehow still seems cluttered. Daniel has a huge personal collection of books and CD's, a lithography press and over thirty years of artwork stored in this space... plenty of personal history in here.

- Over the next couple of hours, we look through many possibilities for the upcoming Dehuman group exhibition I've programmed him in to. My position as a curator is to offer a varied view of Erban's project: I don't want to limit his work to a strictly psycho-sexual reading; I do want to capture the chaos and the diversity of his drawing style.

- We chat a lot while looking over the work. I am pleased to see that this artist has an expressed interest in comics (I spot L'Association's enormous Comix2000 book on his shelf) and zines; this diversity and openness is admirable in a man of Erban's age.

- Erban seems to have a way with words that tends to get him in trouble occasionally; he loves to talk Canadian art-scene politics, and he has some pretty strong opinions about all the problems in our cultural scene. I'm pretty tolerant of his viewpoints, but I also keep wondering if his work would be better received if it didn't always come with a good dose of personal politics. Is the artwork separable from the man? It occurs that it all might be more mysterious if the artist would just keep silent... let the work be the only thing that speaks.

- This image is a sneak peek at a series of vertical-emphasis gestural works that will be shown in the Dehuman project, scheduled to open in mid-January and then tour around a bit in 2007; this represents only a portion of what we'll be including in the show. I've worked with Daniel before, and he's got a good sense of how to install his artwork, usually positioned in tight groupings. I think that there is a strength in presenting these drawings in framed clusters; each image reverberates off the last, and it kind of calms down the overall aggression of the singular pieces. It's a wise move, and I'm sure we will take this approach in January. •

(Mark Laliberte)