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Duran Contemporain

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Canada
Montreal, QC
Duran Contemporain

Duran Contemporain is an innovative contemporary art gallery

Duran|Mashaal is a new premier art gallery that showcases international contemporary emerging and mid-career artists.

08/27/2026

Opening reception
Thursday, September 10, 5–8 PM
The artist will be present.
In collaboration with the Embassy of Spain in Ottawa.

08/11/2026

Ines Fernandez-Shaw
Some Rest For the Wicked, 2026
Huile sur toile / Oil on canvas
24 x 40 inches
61 x 101.6 cm
(IFS012)

08/10/2026

Victoria P. Wonnacott
Ring of Fire, 2026
Acrylique sur panneau / Acrylic on panel
26 ¼” (d)

Ring of Fire is built through deception. What first appears to be a ring of flames is, on closer inspection, made from painted sheets of note paper—crumpled, folded and arranged around a dense black centre. Wonnacott turns an ordinary, disposable object into something volatile. The familiar grid of the paper remains visible beneath the orange and yellow folds, creating a tension between the everyday and the theatrical.

The illusion extends beyond the central motif. The pale outer rim resembles a physical frame surrounding the image, but it too is entirely painted. This trompe-l’œil device destabilizes the boundary between the artwork and its support: what seems to project outward is actually contained within the same flat painted surface.

That play between appearance and material reality is central to the work. Wonnacott gives convincing volume to things that are not physically there—a frame without a frame, paper that is paint, flames that are not flames. The black centre intensifies the effect, functioning almost as an absence against which these carefully constructed illusions become more vivid.

The title Ring of Fire reinforces the initial misreading while also complicating it. The work invites us to trust what we see, then quietly corrects us. What begins as an image of heat and combustion becomes an exploration of perception itself: how quickly the eye completes an image, and how painting can exploit that instinct.

07/07/2026

Inés Fernández-Shaw
Some Rest for the Wicked, 2026
Oil on canvas
24” x 40”

Inés Fernández-Shaw’s painting stages the body as both landscape and object of estrangement. The figure is rendered with a soft, almost sculptural fullness, its limbs folded inward and pressed into a compact mass. The absence of the head from view is crucial: it removes portraiture, identity, and expression, leaving the viewer to read the body through weight, posture, and exposure. The flesh is luminous and carefully modelled, but the pose resists idealization. Rather than offering the reclining n**e as an image of ease or seduction, Fernández-Shaw turns it into something more unstable: a body caught between rest, withdrawal, vulnerability, and self-containment.

At the same time, the painting operates as a form of self-representation, though one that refuses direct access to identity. The self is not presented through the face, gaze, or any recognizable expression; it is displaced into posture, weight, exposure, and bodily compression. The body folds into itself, becoming almost sculptural, a landscape of flesh shaped by rest and withdrawal. This absence of the face does not erase subjectivity. On the contrary, it makes the painting more psychologically charged: the self is present, but not available through the conventional signs of portraiture.

The birds are essential to this reading. Fernández-Shaw has described them as representing the part of her consciousness to which she does not have access. Small in scale but symbolically central, they sit outside the body while remaining intimately connected to it. They suggest a divided interior life: the visible self and the unknowable self, the body that can be seen and the mental space that remains inaccessible even to the subject. What might first appear as an enigmatic outdoor n**e becomes an image of psychic fragmentation and self-observation. The painting is sensuous, but not passive; intimate, but not confessional. It presents the self as something partially hidden from itself.

06/22/2026

Daniel Itiose’s Temporary Sanity (2023) draws on a long history of portraiture in which facial expression serves as a vehicle for psychological inquiry. The painting recalls traditions that range from seventeenth-century character studies to the exaggerated physiognomies of Expressionism, yet its subject remains firmly contemporary. Rather than presenting a stable likeness, Itiose depicts a figure actively manipulating his own face, pulling at his eyes, cheeks, and mouth as if testing the limits of self-control.

The composition is built around a simple but unsettling contradiction. The figure appears to smile, yet every gesture suggests strain. Fingers force the mouth open to reveal clenched teeth, while widened eyes stare directly at the viewer with an intensity that borders on alarm. The accumulation of hands fragments the face into competing expressions, making it impossible to settle on a single emotional state. Humour and anxiety occupy the same space.

The title, Temporary Sanity, provides an important entry point. The portrait can be read as a meditation on the effort required to maintain composure in public life. The exaggerated grin resembles the social mask people adopt to conceal exhaustion, frustration, or vulnerability. Rather than portraying madness or instability, Itiose focuses on the labour of appearing normal. The painting captures a fleeting moment when that performance begins to falter, exposing the tension that lies beneath the surface.

Executed with remarkable technical precision, the work avoids the detached coolness often associated with photorealism. Every detail serves the psychological charge of the image. The result is a portrait that feels both theatrical and deeply human: a depiction of someone caught between the desire to remain composed and the impossibility of sustaining that pose indefinitely.

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”

Adresse

372 Rue Ste-Catherine Ouest, Suite 527
Montreal, QC
H3B1A2

Heures d'ouverture

Mercredi	10am - 5pm
Jeudi	10am - 7pm
Vendredi	10am - 5pm
Samedi	11am - 5pm

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