Art Consultancy and Writing

Fading to Nought
Chris Langlois

Although the scale of Chris Langlois' painting, 'Rain (blue, grey and violet) No. 45', recalls the form of a panorama, its vista is defined by the mood of hesitation that precedes rainfall. Passages of overcast sky govern the painting and convey the diffuse, abstract domain of human emotion, the opaque quality of its consciousness. The sky simultaneously consumes and empties itself; it nurses a sensibility which refrains from direct expression, turns within itself and is freed, released in invisible rain. The painting's landform becomes a sedimentary layer of the atmosphere, and suggests that the earth is an uncertain foothold to the expanse of changing feeling and thought.

The seascapes are identified in their titles by the palette of colour, as if they are abstract paintings. Unmarked by the lines of latitude and longitude, they are not specified as particular locations. The markings of Langois' brushstrokes are also invisible, blended so finely that the paintings appear to fall through the woven texture of their surface. They reside in an atmosphere behind the canvas, like afterimages imprinted on the eye's lining.

(From 'Fading to Nought', catalogue of Chris Langlois' paintings,
Martin Browne Fine Art, 2001) Chris Langlois, Rain (blue, grey and violet) No. 45 (detail), 2000,
oil on linen,168 x 335cm. Courtesy of Martin Browne Fine Art

• Circling
• Weeping
• Fading