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Learn more about Plural

Plural celebrates the best of contemporary art in Canada. Formerly known as the Papier Art Fair, Plural is organized by the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC). Building on a 2026 edition that welcomed 45 exhibitors from 9 Canadian cities, the fair returns from April 9–11, 2027.

Plural célèbre le meilleur de l’art contemporain au Canada. Auparavant la foire Papier, Plural est organisée par l’Association des galeries d’art contemporain (AGAC). Forte d'une édition 2026 qui a accueilli 45 exposants en provenance de 9 villes canadiennes, la foire sera de retour du 9 au 11 avril 2027.

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Les œuvres deviendront visibles au public à partir du 10 avril, jusqu'au au 1er mai 2026.
Pour les titulaires de billets VIP, l'accès débute le 2 avril à midi. Il est encore temps d'acheter vos billets !

Revenez le 10 avril pour avoir accès aux œuvres en ligne !

Les œuvres deviendront visibles au public à partir du 10 avril, jusqu'au au 1er mai 2026.
Pour les titulaires de billets VIP, l'accès débute le 2 avril à midi. Il est encore temps d'acheter vos billets!

Grâce à votre compte VIP, accédez au catalogue d'œuvres en primeur.

Pour vous connecter, entrez les 14 chiffres de votre identifiant VIP qui se trouve sur votre billet.   

Bonne visite!

Félicitations, vos coordonnées ont été transmises à l'exposant.

Nous pouvons transmettre votre nom et votre adresse courriel aux propriétaires de cette galerie afin qu'ils puissent vous contacter à l'avenir. Ces communications vous informeront des dernières œuvres des artistes qu'ils représentent et des événements organisés par la galerie.

Vous aimez ce que vous voyez ? 

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The artworks will be visible to the public from April 10 to May 1, 2026.
For VIP ticket holders, access begins at noon on April 2.


Come back on April 10 to access the artworks online!

The artworks will be visible to the public from April 10 to May 1, 2026.
For VIP ticket holders, access begins at noon on April 2.

Enjoy an exclusive preview of the artworks with your VIP account.

To log in, enter the 14 numbers of your VIP ID number on your ticket.  

Enjoy your visit!

Congratulations, your details have been forwarded to the exhibitor.

We can pass on your name and email address to the owners of this gallery so that they can contact you in the future. These communications will inform you of the latest works of the artists they represent and gallery events.

Do you like what you see?

**Q: We sometimes hear about art consultants or advisors. How does their role fit in with, or compare to, that of galleries?**

**Anie Deslauriers**: Art consultants or advisors play a role that complements that of galleries within the contemporary art ecosystem. Their work primarily involves supporting collectors, whether emerging or experienced, in defining and developing their collections. They can help collectors better understand the artistic context, identify artists or works that align with their interests, and navigate the art market.

Galleries, for their part, occupy a central position in supporting and promoting artists’ work. They often represent artists over the long term: organizing exhibitions, producing works, supporting career development, and building critical and institutional visibility around their practice.


**Q: How would you describe your role as an art consultant or advisor to someone who is just beginning to take an interest in collecting?**

**Danna Heitner**: The role of an art advisor is to provide guidance in the collection, acquisition, display and maintenance of art.

This relationship always begins with *education*. Education is a two-way street. Obtaining an in-depth understanding of the client’s interests, goals, and budget is pivotal. From there, introducing artwork that is tailored to the client. Ideally, for the client to see as much art in person as possible is the best means to cultivate one’s taste.

It is an advisor’s role to help the client *navigate* the complex art market by providing access to artists, galleries, dealers, art fairs and auction houses. A good art advisor has built important relationships with key players that will facilitate art acquisition.

**Q: In practical terms, who retains the services of an art consultant, the gallery or the client?**


**Anie Deslauriers**: In my experience, in general, the collectors or clients retain the services of the art consultant and pay for this support. The consultant therefore primarily acts in the interest of their client, helping them identify works, better understand the market, and build a collection.
 
In some cases, agreements may exist between a gallery and a consultant regarding the structure of a commission on sales facilitated by the consultant.

This aspect of the collaboration should be clarified from the outset to ensure everything proceeds smoothly!


**Q: In your view, how can consultants help make collecting more accessible or easier for new collectors?**

**Anie Deslauriers**: Consultants can play a reassuring role for emerging collectors. By sharing their knowledge of the field, they help demystify the art market, deepen understanding of artistic practices, and support informed decision-making.

I believe that this guidance can make initial acquisitions more accessible and less intimidating, while also fostering a more sustained and confident relationship with galleries and artists, particularly in discovery-driven contexts like Plural.


**Q: Could you share an example of how you have supported a client in acquiring a work of art?**

**Mylène Lachance-Paquin:** In my approach, acquisition is not simply a purchase, it is a strategic and engaged act, driven by a vision and an intention, and guided by a sharp reading of the market.

I recently worked with a client who wanted to build a collection from the very beginning, with the desire to engage with socially committed contemporary practices. My role was to translate that intuition into clear directions, then identify artists whose work offered both conceptual relevance and alignment with her values.

I acted as an active intermediary – facilitating access to works, fostering dialogue with galleries, and coordinating the sale, invoicing, framing, delivery and installation at the client's home.

In a market that remains largely opaque and marked by systemic biases, this kind of mediation is essential. What matters to me is contributing to collections that stand the test of time, both critically and in alignment with the collector's values.


## In conclusion

To start collecting, the first step is to take the time to look and explore: visit exhibitions, meet gallerists and get acquainted with different artistic practices. It is also helpful to ask questions and learn – about the artist's approach, the context of the work, or how the market operates. Galleries and consultants play a key role in this process and can guide new collectors through their first acquisitions. Finally, events such as **Plural** offer a valuable opportunity to discover multiple galleries and artists in one place, making them an excellent entry point into collecting.

Whether you are a newcomer or a seasoned collector, the art ecosystem is full of resources and people ready to support you!

**If you want to work with a consultant, reach out to [info@agac.ca](mailto:info@agac.ca) to find trusted professionals across Canada.**

**Anie Deslauriers** *is the General Director of the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC), a non-profit organization that represents commercial contemporary art galleries across Canada. Having worked in both institutional and gallery settings, such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Blouin Division gallery, she has an in-depth knowledge of the gallery network and the contemporary art market.*

**Danna Heitner** *is a contemporary art advisor and founder of **[Danna Heitner Advisory](https://www.dannaheitneradvisory.com/)**, based in Toronto. She works with both private individuals and corporate clients as well as architects and interior designers to deliver inspired spaces to live and work. With 30 years of experience and continued active participation, [Danna Heitner Advisory](https://www.dannaheitneradvisory.com/) offers a discerning eye and access to a global network. With her guidance, the client’s art purchases have proven to be personally meaningful and financially sound.*

**Mylène Lachance-Paquin**, *based in Montreal, is an independent curator, writer, consultant and founder of [Ogive](https://ogive.ca/). Through [Ogive](https://ogive.ca/), she integrates contemporary art into events, businesses, and spaces, working with designers and architects to offer a tailored art advisory service. [Ogive](https://ogive.ca/) aims to create experiences that elevate corporate environments and bring art closer to the general public, while remaining true to each client's values.*

L'écosystème artistique regroupe une panoplie d'acteur·ice·s différent·e·s – artistes, galeries, centre d’artistes autogérés, conseiller·ère·s, consultant·e·s et autres – dont les rôles se complètent sans toujours être bien compris. 

Cet article vous propose de démystifier ces dynamiques, plus particulièrement **le rôle des consultant·e·s en art**, pour mieux comprendre comment ils contribuent à rendre l'art plus accessible et où ils s'inscrivent dans le marché.

Pour ce faire, des professionnelles du milieu – Anie Deslauriers, directrice de l'AGAC ayant travaillé dans le milieu des galeries pendant plusieurs années, ainsi que des conseillères en art œuvrant à Montréal et à Toronto, Mylène Lachance-Paquin et Danna Heitner, – décortiquent le rôle des consultant·e·s et conseiller·ère·s en art à travers ce Q&A.


Collectionner : démystifier le rôle des consultant·e·s en art 

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Galleries, artists, dealers, artist-run centres, advisors, consultants – the contemporary art ecosystem brings together a diverse range of actors whose roles, though interconnected, are not always clearly understood.

This article aims to demystify these dynamics, in particular the role of art consultants and advisors, to better understand how they help make art more accessible and where they fit within the market.

To do so, industry professionals – Anie Deslauriers, AGAC’s General Director with years of experience in the gallery world, alongside Montreal and Toronto-based art advisors Mylène Lachance-Paquin and Danna Heitner – break down the role of art consultants in this Q&A.


Collecting: Demystifying the Role of Art Consultants

## For the fourth edition of the Plural Fair, Loto-Québec is once again partnering with artch to provide a platform for emerging artists.

Saturation—or excess—is unique to each of us. Our limits are not universal, and we do not reach saturation in the same way. The emotional impact of an event does not carry the same weight for everyone and perhaps that is where the complexity of the phenomenon lies: what pushes one person over the edge may leave another still within a tolerable zone. This tipping point is inherent to each individual.

To each their own affects, to each their own threshold.

Overload feels like a call for help: the moment when the body, the heart, the senses reach their limit. A signal. An internal alarm. The body speaking when reason still refuses to listen.

That tiny moment when everything shifts, when “more” is no longer synonymous with “better”—this is where the exhibition takes root. That intrusive thought, that micro-state that tells us it’s too much, that everything is about to spill over. What was once acceptable no longer is. An imperceptible shift that changes everything. The moment when the bearable becomes unbearable, when fullness becomes overflow.

This point of no return is rich: it contains within it a whole history of accumulation, of exhausted patience, of thresholds crossed. A volcano before eruption or a Big Bang—an infinite concentration of matter and energy that can no longer contain itself and must explode in order to exist otherwise.

This exhibition considers saturation as a condition for creation, for radical transformation.

Because saturation is also ecstasy, exhilaration, pleasure, release. A loss of control that can be both gentle and fatal. The mechanism is the same, regardless of how we frame it: it builds, it builds, and then suddenly, it bursts. Whether in pleasure or collapse, it is the same upward movement seeking release.

Saturation carries within it this dual promise: that of exhaustion or revelation. The moment when something gives way, when something can finally emerge.

The breaking point as possibility.

Featuring the artists:

Montreal-based visual artist **Janna Yotte** develops a sculptural practice that explores the body, vulnerability, and transformation. Trained in photography and graphic design, she began her career with collage before shifting toward striking three-dimensional works.

Interdisciplinary artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, **Gabrielle Turbide** works at the intersection of art, biology, and technology. Her practice examines imposed forms of erasure—of bodies, voices, and ecosystems—and the dynamics of resistance that inhabit them.

Originally from Gatineau, **Zacharie Gauvreau** is a Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist and a graduate in visual and media arts from UQAM. Recipient of the McAbbie Foundation Excellence Scholarship (2023), his work has been exhibited in galleries, artist-run centres, and festivals across Quebec, including Blouin Division (2026), Atelier Silex (2025), artch (2023), Art Souterrain (2021), and AXENÉO7 (2019).

Renowned Québécois printmaker, **Guy Langevin (Loto-Québec Collection)** practices intaglio with a mastery that makes each print a visual event. His work explores zones of shadow and light—both literally and metaphorically—through subjects where softness and darkness coexist without resolution.

Visual artist **Florence Viau** examines the memory of the image and the limits of its mediums. Her practice navigates the tension between the permanence of stone and the transience of the screen, exploring what it means to fix an image—and what is lost in the attempt.

Born in Port-au-Prince, **Vladim Vilain** is a visual artist whose practice unfolds between Haiti and Canada, where he settled in 2012. Working primarily with photography, he approaches the image as a space of transformation where memory, spirituality, and identity converge. Rooted in Afro-surrealism, his work draws on ancestral traditions and folklore to construct worlds that exist between the visible and the invisible.

*Par Manon Pouliot, Responsable de la Collection Loto-Québec, et Sarah Kitzy Gineau Delyon, directrice de artch*




Loto-Québec présente artch : Vertige de l'excès

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*By Manon Pouliot, Head of the Loto-Québec Collection, and Sarah Kitzy Gineau Delyon, Director of artch*




Loto-Québec presents artch: Vertige de l'excès

###### 1. Nicholas Crombach - Art Mûr
## *Cross Section III*, 2024

*Cross Section III* explores the intertwining of natural and artificial materials through the languages of geology, museology, and exhibitions. The work reflects on the blurred boundaries between nature and culture that define our current geological era. The colour palette and the carefully composed arrangement of materials highlight how materials accumulate, persist, and transform over time. The assemblage of these objects thus suggests the emergence of a world in which natural and human histories are inseparable. *Cross Section III* invites reflection on the hybridity of materials, exhibition systems, and the way objects carry multiple histories within them, existing both as vestiges of the past and active participants in the present.

*Cross Section III will be located on the 2nd floor, across from the staircase and the Loto-Québec booth, P06.*


###### 2. Christos Pantieras - de Montigny Contemporary
## *In Bits and Pieces*, 2018
   

*In Bits and Pieces* examines the narratives and circumstances of men who discreetly seek intimacy with other men. Phrases such as “My wife doesn’t know I’m doing this,” “I’m told I’m really good,” and “I’m new to this” reveal secrecy, overconfidence, and initiation. Drawn from the profile descriptions of online dating and hookup platforms, these statements function as condensed confessions, distilling complex personal situations into brief declarations.

The work takes the form of letter boards and pedestal board signs, objects typically used to communicate, inform, or provide direction. Repurposed here, they reference human experience, presenting emotionally charged statements lifted directly from anonymous profiles. These anthropomorphic sculptures operate both as witnesses to and participants in an online world shaped by desire, vulnerability, and concealment. As viewers, we encounter moments of anticipation, loss, and uncertainty, and are left to consider whether these stories are slowly unravelling, or being rebuilt, piece by piece.

*In Bits and Pieces will be on display on the first floor, facing *Esse arts+opinions*, booth R01.*

###### 3. Douglas Scholes - Galerie Robertson Arès
## *(This is) What happens when a thing is maintained (?)*, 2026


Douglas Scholes explores temporality and vulnerability in this sculptural installation of roughly 1,500 beeswax bricks. Warm, organic aromas introduce an olfactory dimension, while the material’s fragility contrasts with traditional brick, underscoring the towers’ precarity. 

**Performances by artist Douglas Scholes**  
**Friday April 10, 5 p.m. / Saturday April 11, 1 p.m. / Sunday April 12, 3 p.m.**

The artist engages with the structures through gestures of maintenance, reconfiguration, and repair, revealing the subtle tension between the transient and the enduring, and inviting reflection on ephemerality, care, performativity, and the sensorial experience of sculpture and public art.

*(This is) What happens when a thing is maintained (?) will be located on the first floor across from Galerie Robertson Arès, booth 118, and next to Wishbone Galerie, booth 138.*

###### 4. Stanley Wany - ELLEPHANT
## *Pè Béto*, 2025 & *Sur le chemin de Port-au-Prince*, 2024-2025

Inspired by the Zangbeto, the traditional night guardians of Vodún among the Ogu peoples of Benin and Togo, Pè Béto reimagines their powerful masquerade form. Hidden within the sculpture, a speaker plays music recorded by Wany’s grandfather, Albert Gibbs. In the recording, he performs mandolin songs dedicated to each of his children who left Haiti in the early 1970s. The sculpture becomes a vessel of diasporic memory, carrying stories of departure, longing, and continuity across generations.

*Sur le chemin de Port-au-Prince* draws on the history of Wany’s family in Haiti, who built and operated a coffee processing factory in the 
mid-twentieth century. From cultivation to roasting, coffee production depended on the skill and labour of those who prepared it. Drawing and ink washes combine to evoke this family history. A dominant wash leads toward the export warehouse, where farmers’ and family names were replaced by the generic label “Café d’Haïti.”

**Artist Talk with Stanley Wany**  
**Sunday April 12, 1 p.m. - In French** 

Meet artist Stanley Wany for an artist talk about the installation on view at the fair, where he will explore the concepts of heritage and tradition that lie at the heart of his practice.

*Look for Pè Béto on the first floor across from the ELLEPHANT, booth 115.*


To learn more about the Plural installations, join Léa Lanthier-Lapierre for [a guided tour](https://www.plural.art/en/programmation) in French, *Tendre le fil : un parcours des installations*, on Saturday, April 11 at 12 p.m., or in English, *Weaving the Thread: A Walk Through the Installations*, on Sunday, April 12 at 3 p.m.!



## Lors de votre visite à Plural, laissez vous porter par les installations de la foire. Ces installations grand format sont les œuvres qui ne rentrent pas dans les kiosques, de par leur nature hybride ou leur taille atypique, ponctuant l’espace et se déployant librement hors les murs. Ces projets spéciaux interrogent et redéfinissent l'interaction entre l'art et l'espace, offrant au public une immersion au-delà des formats habituels.

Sortez du cadre conventionnel and allez à la rencontre de ces installations, qui sont réparties sur les deux étages du Grand Quai: 



Au-delà du cadre : découvrez les installations phares de Plural 2026

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## During your visit to Plural, let yourself be drawn to the installations of the fair. These large-scale installations are works that do not fit into the booths, due to their hybrid nature or unusual size, punctuating the space, extending freely beyond the walls. These special projects explore and redefine the interplay between art and space, offering the public an immersive experience that goes beyond conventional formats.

Step outside the booth walls and discover these installations, which are spread across the two floors of the Grand Quay:



Exhibitors

Forum

From the blog

Collecting: Demystifying the Role of Art Consultants

Loto-Québec presents artch: Vertige de l'excès

Beyond the Booths: Discover the Installations of Plural 2026