Cerj Lalonde

At the center of Cerj Lalonde’s practice is a reversal: the image does not simply wait to be seen; it seems to watch back. Born in Montréal in 1954, the Canadian artist works across abstract painting, photography, digital media, installation and public intervention. Eyes, masks, squares and circles recur throughout his work, not as a fixed code but as devices that make looking visible. Their presence turns each composition into an encounter between object and observer.

Lalonde studied anthropology and art history at Université de Montréal, Université Laval and UQAM. That background helps explain why his abstractions remain closely tied to questions of culture, identity and communication. Saturated colors are organized into grids, bands and geometric interruptions, while looser gestures prevent the surface from settling into pure order. He treats color as an active force capable of attracting, destabilizing and directing attention. His work has developed across Montréal, Miami, Europe and China, with each setting feeding a deliberately mobile practice.

Painting remains the foundation of his language, yet Lalonde has repeatedly carried its symbols beyond the canvas. In projects such as Seeing, the spectator entered an environment populated by eyes and became the apparent subject of the installation. Other bodies of work have combined physical objects, photography, projected imagery and digital systems. Across these formats, Lalonde returns to the same unresolved exchange: how images acquire authority, how viewers complete them and how perception changes when the work acknowledges our presence. His art does not offer a stable answer; it creates the conditions for attention.