...and perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side, the outside, on the other, the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel ...

— Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

Marmo Gallery and Desuetude Press present the archives of Élise Lafontaine.

This archive, published bilingually, serves as a window into the foundations of Élise Lafontaine’s painting practice through which we can see the links between corporeality, spirituality, and architecture that Lafontaine weaves together. From photos of the caves in Lombrives to writings on the relationship between perceptual and sensory experience, we see behind the physicality of the canvas to reveal her painting’s conceptual background.

The present document sums up the evolution of Élise Lafontaine’s research on the field from the past four years, during which she was attuned to a variety of physical, psychological, cultural, and social phenomena. Her process begins with historical research, followed by an immersive experience, or residency, which is then archived through photography and writing. Each series of paintings that follow is created according to the particulars of each place: light, volume, iconography, body sensation, lived experience, and history of the place and its occupants. These elements of various natures meet on the surface of the canvas, and painting allows Lafontaine to create new reverberations between them, giving rise to sensitive and contemplative abstractions.

During her residencies, she has infiltrated the prehistoric caves of the Ariege Pyrenees (France), the prison, and psychiatric environments (Switzerland), and the Carmelite monastery in Montreal (Canada). Text, references, and images from Lafontaine’s personal records function as testimonies of minor histories which, brought together, pay tribute to people, places, gestures, or lesser-known bits of knowledge, themselves locked in something that surpasses them.