Through distinctive and expressive paintings, sculptures, and installations, David Lafrance creates sensorial experiences that unsettle the gaze. For an artist whose preferred genre is landscape painting, this expressivity suggests his rapport with nature and its representation. Lafrance initially made his mark with landscapes teeming with detail in chimerical colours in the vein of Bad Painting and Surrealism. In his Montr\u00e9al studio, he imagined heavenly lands rich with cornucopias, oscillating between magic and disillusionment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2020, Lafrance\u2019s practice changed profoundly: he moved his studio to the countryside, where he refined his approach to inhabited and cultivated territory. On a slope of Mont Saint-Hilaire, he planted his first garden, from which a new body of work emerged. The resulting paintings are imposing, sharing a ground-level, close-up view among the vegetables, dominated by fragmentary compositions and expressive collages. Lewd cucumbers, succulent squash, and lush foliage coexist in these raw and luxuriant oil paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, Lafrance\u2019s most recent series, Jardin topographique<\/em> (2022\u200a\u2013\u200a23), presents a bird\u2019s-eye view of the land. In miniature, he re-created the environment surrounding his studio, including the mountain, the conurbations at its foot, and the Richelieu River up to the Chambly Basin. This twelve-kilometre stretch of land is also shaped by agriculture, from traditional small-scale to intensive monoculture farming. As for Lafrance\u2019s garden, he patiently tended and observed it over time, photographing its transformations and the subtle manifestations of the fauna that lives there. The garden\u2019s design, crop control, and promise of abundant harvests all became secondary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These paintings suggest a more symbiotic relationship with nature through the use of reframing, texture, and palimpsest. Lafrance constantly returns to this unruly, fertile motif, challenging the catastrophic potential of climate change. In doing so, he hopes to preserve something that he has carried deep within himself since childhood: the image of Mont Saint-Hilaire, its recurring silhouette amid his agricultural landscapes evoking the fragile equilibrium of these ecosystems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Independent curator Marie-\u00c8ve Charron has, for many years, been the art critic for Le Devoir<\/em>. She teaches art history in the visual arts department of C\u00e9gep de Saint-Hyacinthe, for which she is also the coordinator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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