Winter Park No.4 1992
oil on canvas
25 x 32.5cm
Artwork: 836
Winter Park No.4 1992oil on canvas
25 x 32.5cm
Artwork: 836
Autumn Park No.12 1992oil on canvas
25.5 x 32cm
Artwork: 837
Winter Park No.24 1992oil on canvas
30.5 x 38cm
Artwork: 838
Zero No.27 1993oil on canvas
120 x 100cm
Artwork: 857
Rain No.30 1996oil on canvas
170 x 150cm
Artwork: 893
Landscape (Indigo Blue No.2) 1998oil on linen
152 x 168cm
Artwork: 915
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Brief biography
Born in Gosford in 1969, Chris Langlois studied painting and drawing at the University of Newcastle, and later completed postgraduate studies at the University of Sydney. He has been exhibiting since 1989, and in 2001-2002, a survey exhibition, Everything and Nothing, was presented by Metro Arts, Brisbane, and the Newcastle Region Art Gallery. As well as the Allens collection, Chris Langlois is represented in many public, corporate and private collections, including Artbank, Cambelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery, New England Regional Art Gallery, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Macquarie Bank and the University of Technology Sydney.
About the works
Chris Langlois' paintings Rain No.30 1996 and Landscape (Indigo Blue No. 2) – from his 1998 Sydney exhibition, Landscape and Memory – are more than depictions of a particular place; they are reflections on the genre of landscape painting itself. Minimalist and atmospheric, the contrast of colour between land and sky and the blurred horizon allude to that sense of the sublime one associates with paintings by the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich. The essay that accompanied his survey exhibition begins:
It is hard to imagine paintings more able to indicate the longing of looking and the viewer's relationship with the image than the landscapes of Chris Langlois. His views of horizons, the sky, the sea, mountainous landforms and fields of colour that could be water, air or a leaf, represent the most universal aspects of the natural world. But what strikes us is not so much the generality of the description but that these landscapes are strangely unanchored. While they are like our visual experience of the world, they do not fulfil typical expectations of landscape representation. Langlois' paintings are unconcerned with the identification of the particularities of place. There are no strikingly shaped bays or headlands, characteristic plant life or vernacular buildings that the paintings recall to us, there is no particular 'there' to which we might wish to go. In this way, Langlois aims at a generic approach to landscape, which by not referring to identifiable, mappable terrain would have us consider the problems of painting as a whole rather than individual successes or failures in representing place. This is landscape as opposed to Australian landscape, or at least that is the works' ostensible claim.
Rosemary Hawker, 'Everything and nothing: Chris Langlois' landscape paintings', 2002
There are six paintings by Chris Langlois in the Allens collection. The first were small, thickly painted abstractions from a 1992 series based on studies of a park in autumn and winter, but these expressive, gestural daubs of paint soon gave way to smoother and glossier, more thinly painted surfaces reminiscent of rain falling – as illustrated by the two works Rain No. 30 1996 and Landscape (Indigo Blue No.2) 1998
Works in the Allens collection
Winter Park No.4 1992
oil on canvas, 25 x 32.5cm
Artwork: 836
Autumn Park No.12 1992
oil on canvas, 25.5 x 32cm
Artwork: 837
Winter Park No.24 1992
oil on canvas, 30.5 x 38cm
Artwork: 838
Zero No.27 1993
oil on canvas, 120 x 100cm
Artwork: 857
Rain No.30 1996
oil on canvas, 170 x 150cm
Artwork: 893
Landscape (Indigo Blue No.2) 1998
oil on linen, 152 x 168cm
Artwork: 915