Franco-Canadian painter influenced by 19th-century Romanticism, presents abstract landscape paintings that celebrate emotion, imagination, and the subjective nature of reality.
Explore the invisible relationship between memory, light, silence, and perception.
I paint landscapes that do not exist, or rather, landscapes that exist only within. What interests me is not a place, but what remains of a place when you close your eyes: a light, a mist, a silence, the memory of a horizon.
My work follows in the footsteps of the great nineteenth-century Romantics. From J.M.W. Turner I learned that light could dissolve form, and from Caspar David Friedrich that a landscape could become a state of mind. From lyrical abstraction, which shaped my early years, I kept the gesture and the energy of the paint itself.
Each work begins on the computer, with studies and digital compositions, before taking shape under the brush on wood panel. I layer acrylic, water-mixable oil and ink glazes, building up the surface until the contours fade, in an effect close to sfumato. Cracks, fissures and my beloved Payne’s grey give the surface a memory, as if time had already passed over it.
I deliberately leave each painting open. There is no imposed story, only a space where each viewer can project their own.
Born in France and holding dual French and Canadian citizenship, François Haguier is a painter based in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Drawing on more than thirty years of professional practice in painting and graphic design, he has been developing a series of atmospheric abstract landscapes since 2022, painted in acrylic and ink on wood panel.
His work has evolved through several periods: lyrical abstraction (2010–2022), then the Urban Skyline series (2013–2022), in which urban verticals gradually faded to make way for the natural forms of the landscape. From 2019 to 2021, he ran the Artsversus gallery in Sherbrooke, a name his studio still carries today.
Since 2013, his work has been shown in more than fifty solo and group exhibitions across Quebec, including the Centre culturel Yvonne L. Bombardier in Valcourt, Orford Musique, the Centre culturel Pierre-Gobeil in Sherbrooke, Espace Galerie F. Dunn, and Galerie Maël in Montreal, where his work has been on permanent display since 2025. He takes part every year in the Grande Virée artistique in Sherbrooke.
His paintings are represented by Galerie Courtemanche in Magog and Maël Courtage en Art in Montreal, and are held in private collections. He also accepts commissions, and select works are available in limited editions.
