Over the past several years, Elise Lafontaine has developed a sophisticated language of forms and colour that she continues to subject to subtle and surprising transformations. Lafontaine is attuned to the extraordinary physical and psychological force that can emerge from the encounter between oil paint and fabric. These new works are deliberately difficult to fix. Rectilinear structures soften; rounded forms become architectural; symmetry gives way to subtle distortions. Colour appears simultaneously solid and atmospheric, surface and depth, substance and light. The works continually frustrate the desire to settle upon a stable reading. They move between different perceptual registers: to see a structure, then a body; a surface, then a space; an image, then an object.

Lafontaine experienced weekly visits to church as part of her childhood. It was within the vastness of the nave, during Sunday Mass, that she encountered one of her earliest overwhelming aesthetic experiences: the…