Jean-Pierre Lafrance

Born in Montreal in 1943, Jean-Pierre Lafrance began his studies in drawing and painting at the International School of Fine Arts at the age of sixteen. He relentlessly pursued his passion for the arts at Studio Salette in Montreal, he worked in Jordi Bonet’s studio as well as at Atelier de l ’Île in Val-David, Quebec, where he mastered numerous lithographic and serigraphic techniques. He soon abandoned his representational style, however, and has worked primarily as an abstract artist ever since. For Lafrance, painting is not about figural representation, but simply the act of applying paint to his canvasses, painting not with his hands but his soul.

For over fifty years, Lafrance has helped define a new wave of abstract art in Canada and shows no signs of slowing down. This celebrated artist has gained international recognition for his bold, gestural style, and continues to innovate with each new body of work. Pushing the boundaries of abstraction over the course of his long and fruitful career, he has created a visual language of incommensurable structures, simultaneously real and unreal, orderly and chaotic, matter and liquid. Lafrance does all of this without the need to create a distinctive narrative.

Jean-Pierre’s passionate spirit is reflected in his vivid use of colour and spontaneity. For the artist, abstraction becomes the means of expressing the accumulation of memory and emotion; playing with different applications and techniques in order to reunite the viewer’s sensibilities. Abstraction was not a stylistic goal chosen by Lafrance, but the result of natural artistic evolution over the course of many years.