One day I’ll stand like a tower and touch the sun

An interview with Élise Lafontaine

Time and space, the transit from one sphere or element to another, the unfixedness of pursuing or presenting either. The sense of both and neither. In Archives, the book produced in 2023 for Élise Lafontaine’s exhibition at Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK in Montreal, the artist writes about the impetus for this body of work, perhaps for more than only this work, and she includes a quote from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, his novel published in 1953.

For Élise it is 1995 and she has set her first “studio” in a closet in her bedroom—a safe, private space that housed her body in a protected manner—the first of many connections she has made between the body as architecture, the feminine body in architecture and between art and architecture. Beckett wrote that “perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside,” and it is here that Lafontaine places herself—in the middle and looking out, in the middle space, neither in nor out—the medium, the receiver/perceiver open to everything.

There is no reason to isolate sight from any of the other senses in perceiving the world. If you add sound the experience deepens; if there’s scent the body quickens; if the hands and the soles of the feet feel shifts and interruptions, the body locates itself. Why should making a painting or encountering it not be a comprehensive unity of perception. In describing the research Élise Lafontaine has done, the word “immersive” is readily applied. She has chosen settings that speak to isolation and constraint and perhaps shelter of a certain kind: psychiatric institutions, prisons, caves, cloisters—all spaces that pointedly speak to the body, and then, to the mind and being held inside the body, inside the confining spaces, opening the body to its own endless elaborations, making its own unfolding into individual architectures.

The interview that follows began by asking if there were an overarching idea that might link these varied physical spaces. The artist’s response was “time”— the apprehension of time, also unknown spatial environments with their particular accompanying estrangements, and quests of the spirit. In all of this there is sensuality, the heightened awareness of the body that also moves beyond the body. Élise Lafontaine told us that eroticism, the sensual, in painting had always drawn her with, as she said, its evanescent quality and language of vitality. I think here of a life force and Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s early poem “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” It’s a vital force that won’t be denied, which impels art and is evident in all of Lafontaine’s work. The linking ideas she’d stated—time, a spiritual quest and an unknown sense of spatiality—are here in this poem, in lines such as, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer.” And “The force that drives the water through the rocks / Drives my red blood.” And here, conjuring in particular Lafontaine’s enchantment with the stalactites and stalagmites she’d seen and approached in cave interiors, “The lips of time leech to the fountain head; / Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood / Shall calm her sores. / And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind / How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.”

The caves in the Pyrenees in France, where she’d spent days and nights, most particularly Lombrives Cave, for which she named a body of work, showed her its interior surfaces, surfaces that were complex, endlessly varied and multiple in how they could be seen and felt. La Cathédrale is a large vertical painting, oil on linen. In the book Lombrives, it is preceded by a photograph titled La Galerie Blanche and is an interior view of the cave. Its source of illumination isn’t clear, but the light picks out a naturally formed, pierced, interior stone structure with a geometric cut—an aperture or doorway revealing a depth of space beyond. The doorway here is dark but is echoed in the painting in light, a warm lemon light that emanates with strength from a source that can’t be located. In the painting’s foreground is a gently twisting sphere, elongated or made oval by its movement, like a dancer showing two faces in motion at one time. The turn is around a stabilizing central axis that asserts itself like a gentle steadying arm. Another photograph in Lombrives, Artist’s shadow on a standing stalagmite, is a doubling the way a shadow is, showing the artist tilting against the stone surface—she in black against the amber colour of the stone. She wears the cave’s multiple surfaces. A painting, Untitled (small concretions), oil on linen mounted on volumetric wood, follows the photograph in the book—a doubling, tripling, echoing form and colour, bending and dipping in waves that suggest the undulating unfixed surface of the stalagmite and the leaning shadow figure appearing to have entered onto, and leaving, the stone.

Time spent inside the chambers of the cave provided situations where Lafontaine experienced— she said—both sensory deprivation, in being temporarily in the dark space, and sensory enhancement, in the heightened perception that isolation and solitude in an unknown setting provoked. You are, then, as Beckett had written, inside and outside, a middle point, a new state—hallucinatory and expansive, like the dopamine high the artist refers to in the interview.

Lafontaine’s experience reinforced her firm sense of the ties between architecture and painting, the recognition that looking at a painting on the wall is not a static encounter, that light shifts, shadows move, that colour reads variously. She responded with: works that were oil on linen mounted on volumetric wood, with pillars, person-size, like the Dornach Pillars where she had to embrace them to turn them in her studio as she worked and moving them meant moving herself, too, that looking at the pillar painted in the round meant never seeing it all at once, making its apprehension endless, infinite. And then, she said, “It comes alive.”

Emanations of illumination as though lit from within; round, voluptuous organic forms from the ether, from the garden; the music of the spheres; a palette intense and rich and also soft and ethereal; the inserting into the painted space of oil on linen mounted on curved wood and painted linen windows cut and reset and stitched into place; the endless possibilities of interruptions and interventions, her digressions and self-named transgressions. The sum: the ideal infinite state of being always in medias res.

This interview was conducted by phone with the artist in her Montreal studio on October 2, 2024.

BORDER CROSSINGS: I am fascinated by the range of places you visit—prehistoric caves, monasteries and cloisters, prisons, architectural sites—to name only a few. In your mind is there any overarching idea that links them?

ÉLISE LAFONTAINE: Time. These places don’t have anything in common and are not related to painting, but because they are out of step with the outside world, they all have the capacity to make us feel another time. I think of the cloistered nuns as real punks because they refuse modernity and live at a different pace. Visiting these sites and meeting these communities gave me a different way of looking at the world, and by the same token led me to think about painting differently. To paint, I need to slow down the movement around me, so going to these places meant stepping back. What’s more, these places gave me a unique spatial experience that I can then translate into paint, so I feel in dialogue with worlds previously unknown to me. And each place leads me naturally to the next. I often compare those places to the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, because there’s a spiritual quest at work here, and I sense this quest also intersects with these marginalized communities. So the link is time with the addition of some personal and spiritual questions.

You say you’re interested in the threshold between the visible and the invisible. Is the distinction you’re raising between what you can see and the things you can’t see connected to an idea of spirituality?

It’s exactly that. It’s really strong because when I visit this unknown place, I can visit all the rooms. You always end up in a room and then you end up with a story. It’s where the profane meets the sacred. Also, I never really choose the places I visit. I go to a place and it naturally leads me to the next place. What connects them is my own experience.

When you enter what you call a “chosen space,” you say, you’re hoping for a connection with the aural and physical experiences you had as a child. Is art making, for you, a process of recovery and innocence?

Innocence in the sense that I’d still like to have access to a form of wandering, like when you were a child or a teenager and you could “waste your time.” When I visit a site, I have no idea what I’m looking for. I’m following an intuition as if I had an eternity ahead of me. In the same way, I tend to start over when I paint because I don’t have a fixed plan. There’s a certain naïveté involved as I place myself in the position of an amateur. This occasionally poses a problem, as I have very tight deadlines for my exhibitions. At the moment, I’m looking for a balance between research time, painting in the studio and a life where I can, you know, be in love.

You have remarked that you “place yourself at the centre of spaces and try to embody their edges.” Tell me how you locate yourself to occupy those edges.

It was a metaphor for the fact that most places direct our bodies, just as the symmetry of a cathedral places your body in the centre. For me, walking around the edges means being aware of the history of the places I visit and being attuned to the parts of the architecture I don’t see. I always do research because I’m interested in the history of these places. Since I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly, it’s still an open experience. But to be on the edge is to understand the history of violence connected to the places I visit and not to idealize them. In concrete terms, it means reading all about them and being aware of the stories of violence, which are often directed against women.

So many of the places you go to are sites of confinement that have a darker side. More particularly, they are places where women have been confined. I wonder if the places you choose play into a notion of a feminist spatial aesthetic?

I’m very aware that I’m experiencing life from a woman’s body, and I identify as a woman too. When I feel lost about the direction of my painting, I sometimes go back to Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, a story from 1405 about a female community dedicated to creating a safe space for women. It’s obviously a link to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. These readings guide me toward what you call a feminist spatial aesthetic. I love that term, by the way. The most concrete example is during my workshops in prison with a group of women, when we talked about the experience of the isolation cell, what they called “the hole.” They described how different spaces overlap: the world, the city, the prison, then isolation. The hole represents the smallest space, almost like the end of the world, a place close to the body and often socially misperceived. But for them, it’s also a space of protection, a place of contemplation. They asked me to find my own “room,” and the image of a cave came to mind. I decided to follow my intuition and visit caves.

Tell me what effect that research on places of confinement had on your painting.

I really started manipulating my paintings. First, by making my own canvas, I incorporated a painting into a painting to evoke the space of inside and outside. Then I cut out my paintings to introduce windows in reference to the prison and the hole. I chose to stitch these painted fabrics together as an homage to the work of the incarcerated women whose employment there was to sew boxer shorts for men’s prisons. I call this stitch the hard edge in my painting. I created 3D volume paintings to paint directly on curves, inspired by the paintings found on cave walls and ceilings. These curves are also reminiscent of the architecture of our bodies.

When you go into architectural spaces, you seem able to make the space a body. You anthropomorphize it. Are you aware that so much of your work is about the recognition of the body?

Yes, I’ve always painted bodies. I’m looking to liberate a voice and to reappropriate our bodies. When I talk about bodies, I include organs and the whole interior. I often sand my paintings so that I can see under the layer, and I like that it gives the effect that you can see under the skin, like an x-ray. I play with this idea that the body is an architecture that you can go inside. Let me give you an example. La Carène is the name given to one of the underground galleries in the Lombrives Cave in France. A part of the cave has a long geological fault line and the owners had put lights in this fault to accentuate its presence. The seam in the centre of my painting La Carène recalls this luminous fault. Of course, la carène also refers to the underside of a ship’s hull, an inverted form in the architecture of this gallery. I especially like the fact that La Carène signifies the division of the trachea into the thoracic cage, with air entering through this first gallery of the cave, and it reminded me of the role of the trachea in bringing air to the lungs. In short, it enhanced the feeling that I was inside a living organ, a body. So my paintings are inspired by architecture, but it’s not a pure interest. I’ve never wanted my symmetry to be perfect because the body itself is not perfect. When I look at a Roman vault, I see in the arabesques a rib cage, or long enveloping arms, and caryatids that I interpret as female bodies that support the foundation. I’m interested in how the symbolic nature of architecture connects to the feminine body and feminine experience. When I think about my family of artists who work in subjects in the history of art, but also in literature and cinema, I see that many women have used the metaphor of architecture to talk about the female body in connection with political and social issues. I have in my mind to research what has happened since Judy Chicago’s “Womanhouse” exhibition in Los Angeles in 1972. The representation of women has long been associated with the domestic sphere, but where do we stand today, when women occupy a variety of roles and spaces in society? Maybe we need to go to the side of queer phenomenology to better understand how social relations are organized in space, and how queerness disrupts and reorders them.

…to continue reading the interview with Élise Lafontaine, order a copy of Issue 166 here, or subscribe today.