Known for his acute sense of scale and meticulous technical skills, painter Chris Langlois has found himself increasingly enchanted by the ocean in recent years. Langlois’s approach produces anything but conventional seascape work: his focus on distilling the essence of landscape takes unexpected directions, maintaining an exciting edge for both artist and viewer.

Langlois says he has been getting “much more painterly and expressive” during his recent investigations. “I have been enjoying that process of loosening up again and painting off the shoulder,” he says. “I’ve always seen these seascapes as more like abstract paintings and they have layers and layers of colours and textures. When you are up close to it, there is this lovely sensuality with the paint itself.”

With around a dozen large works in the new show, Langlois has been surprised to discover that “the larger they are, the easier they are to paint—I don’t know why”, though he suspects small works require more attention to composition. With large works, he enjoys the cinematic quality and has found himself playing with his vantage point in the last couple of years—establishing his “view” in such a way that there are areas of incredibly high detail floating amid counterbalancing zones of emptiness that verge on abstraction.

Yet, always, there is the water: the endless variations of the quality of the ocean which he describes as having a fugue-like quality. “The energy of the ocean rising and falling and breathing…the colour in water, just how it morphs from blue violets to red violets into greens and deep yellows and turquoise blues—it is a celebration of colour. Essentially, the ocean is variations of water and the light and the wind.”

Musical Variations on the Theme of the Sea
Chris Langlois
OLSEN Gallery
18 September—12 October

This article was originally published in the September/October 2024 print edition of Art Guide Australia.