David Lafrance

In the quiet madness of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, the Argentinian writer César Aira offers a fictional account of German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858), whose search for a true methodology to see and paint the landscape in its totality leads him to a cataclysmic horseback riding accident that literally imprints the topography onto his body, forever eliminating objective distance and transforming intimate relations between the human and natural worlds.

Aria’s book was on my mind when I was driving north to Laval in January, the roads dry with frost, the landscape a dazzling crust of snow. The question of how to paint nature—or, better yet, what it means to look at nature now—is at the heart of David Lafrance’s thrilling collection of paintings and objects on view at the Salle Alfred-Pellan, wherein the artist confuses easy lines between nature and culture, the land as process and human effort as beauty and travesty. The work is the result of a two-year project wherein Lafrance developed a small garden on a neighbour’s land near his studio in Mont-Saint-Hilaire, a Quebec town of venerable artistic heritage where Ozias Leduc, Paul-Émile Borduas and Jordi Bonet worked. Mont-Saint-Hilaire is also a former industrial site, which included a sugar beet refinery that closed in 1986 and ongoing rare mineral extraction.

Lafrance sees land thick with history and his painting has an equal thickness to it, as well: its surfaces layered, crafted, textured and pressing up and out at the world. Its gestural effort is palpable, too, carved in oil, acrylic and concrete but rooted in the material labour of making a garden, tending it through seasons, at times surrendering to its will to evolve and become wild, all the while looking, documenting, making. Calendar 01 and Calendar 02, for instance, offer 30 and 31 miniature paintings, laid out as calendar days, each recording a moment in his studio, where beech leaves or flower heads, ladybugs or dragonflies appear caught in the material wetness of the paint and are memorialized as is. Along two walls, a line of withered soccer balls (a football here, a volleyball there) appears, rendered in concrete. They are sombre but funny; we want to throw them, kick them, but ouch. Once the animate artifacts of childhood play, Lafrance sees them abandoned and sagging, hardened and reified, lumpen shapes that tease the eye/hand reflex.

Near the entrance, several small paintings attest to the ancient craft of the landscape painter, contrasting the sheer pleasure of mimesis with the bricked-together effect of his painting: a black-capped chickadee in a tree, a barred owl in the snow—somehow startling in their relation to the landscape. Working a painterly yet cut-out vibe, the images set the stage for the viewer, marking similarity as a way to get closer to what we see and an introduction to the folk-like edge of his style. At stake across all these works—a head-shaking love for and dark ambivalence regarding the corrupted status of our relations to the land circa 2025.

In Le Mont Saint-Hilaire depuis Beloeil, 2023, Lafrance offers a view of the mountain wherein objects compete for attention: the exoticism of a palm tree appears as choux de Bruxelles, towering in front of the mountain from which a lone, bulbous eye stares out. At the top, a cut-out of sky appears as a window; at left, thistle blossoms frame a smokestack; and below, black-eyed Susans scatter the edges of field, river, bridge. It’s a view of the garden writ large, not as totality or Gesamtkunstwerk but as unruly collage, an enigmatic portrait, where the landscape is an anarchic source of change, yes, but always a mirror of culture, its eyes looking back at us in unsettling ways.

In Par ta beauté forge demain, 2024, a phrase borrowed from the town of Beloeil’s motto (By your beauty, forge tomorrow), Lafrance paints a semi-aerial view of the garden, showing typical landscape features of field and stream, but it’s not that simple. Concrete monoliths point upwards and rectangular plinths lie on their sides or jut out over the water; the shards of urban ruins ornament the view. The scene appears at conflicting scales, shifting vantage points. At times, the flora seem remote; at times, much closer. Deep under the layer of ground cover, a snake hovers near a shrunken American flag. In these and other moments, the artist imagines a viral and resilient natural world, laying waste to the post-industrial junkscape.

In “Huit saisons,” Lafrance recasts the garden as model, and the view as a critical mode of seeing, drawing us in and calling us towards a reckoning with place under pressure from sprawling cities, urban waste, climate disruption and more. Whereas Aria’s 19th-century painter is a colonizer, going out in search of the unfamiliar and the pristine, painting landscapes of mythic proportions and aiming for knowledge as totality, Lafrance continues to tend the local and the fragmentary, seeing the mythic underfoot and emergent on the everyday terrain of our daily lives. ❚

“David Lafrance: Huit saisons” was exhibited at Salle Alfred-Pellan de la Ville de Laval, Laval, from December 1, 2024, to February 2, 2025.

MJ Thompson is a writer and teacher living in Montreal. She writes about dance, performance and the visual arts.