Jean-Pierre Lafrance

In Land’Es, Jean-Pierre Lafrance contemplates a new approach to a “new land”, using new forms and a new way of working. Here we see the interaction between paint and texture, between full and empty and between him and the other, resulting in vibrant spaces where surface and depth intermingle. Lafrance’s past comes to the forefront in this series, with patterns re-emerging from his years in fashion design. Also present are the artist’s irrevocable links to water and the unknown world, with water representing movement, migration and travel towards something new.

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, 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. 

Lafrance’s passionate spirit is reflected in his expressive bold strokes, 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. For over fifty years, Lafrance has helped define a new wave of abstract art in Canada, and he 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, Lafrance has created a visual language of immeasurable structures, simultaneously real and unreal, orderly and chaotic, matter and liquid. Lafrance does all of this without the need to create a distinctive narrative.