Sentimentalism in painting

Touching the heart and soul through painting has been the road followed by Monique Lalancette. This captivating woman brings into her works an aesthetical, spiritual and existential dimension. Her pieces are metaphors of the soul, a breath of life, pure emotions.

She started in visual arts as a graphic artist and later chose to explore painting through spontaneous gesture. Her first series De la figure au cerf-volant (From figure to kite) are composed of human heads where acrylics are thrown into a stormy space letting the faces dance in the sky, seeking balance and emotion.

In a later stage, symbols become the focus of this painter with a more sober mood when she creates The Hopscotch series. Using this childhood game, seen as a metaphor where life takes place, she strives to make the surface alive using earth colors rendered on a textured background, overcoming the temperance of colors by an awakening to a tactile sensibility.

In 1991, she received a grant from the Canada Council for the series Mémoires (Memories) that dealt with different views on death by ancient civilizations.

Lalancette pursued her exploration with collages and mixed techniques in the series Je ne suis jamais seule (I'm never alone), an assembly of eight pieces constructed with listings from a phone book, as a call to the other.
For the past several years, she has used tea pot as a metaphor of human relationship. She has produced more than a hundred miniature paintings on placoplaster in relation to this theme.

Martine Larocque