Chris Langlois, as a young artist in the 1990s, bravely began his pursuit of realist landscape paintings. This was in an era when most other Australian painters were producing late-century versions of abstraction, expressionism, social commentary or self-analysis.

Langlois has not looked back. He has stuck to his own approach and pushed his subject and style ever further. His steadfastness is akin to that of Mark Rothko, who, in the 1950s, adamantly persevered with his vast minimal canvases with just nuances of change in tone, colour and form. Langlois uses the large scale of his canvases to envelop the viewer, as did Rothko. He entices us into his landscapes and lures us towards the unreachable horizon.

A highlight of my modest art collection is a small Langlois landscape painted in 1996 near his birthplace of Gosford. The picture, Rain, has all the technical virtuosity and magic of an Arthur Streeton oil sketch. Langlois parallels the late-nineteenth-century Heidelberg painters who used small boards for oil sketches when painting in the open air. Langlois’ practice has been to sketch the landscape when making preparatory studies for large canvases. He is dedicated to using space, distance and light and to capture the vastness of the Australian landscape and seas, as Streeton was. The climax of such pictures is often a horizon line that is crisp and shimmering. As Langlois has said, ‘I have always enjoyed creating landscapes that you can disappear into. I am fascinated by distance and the space that you can never reach.’1

Langlois has explained that his depictions of water, sky and land are not necessarily meant to evoke a particular time or place. Rather, they are portrayals of a timeless environment in which people have come and gone. ‘I don’t feel that they are actually landscapes, not literally landscapes,’ he said. ‘They’re much more about a personal experience.’2

Langlois’ exhibition titles are revealing: Everything and nothing,3 Half  light 4and Vanishing Point.

Langlois is a painter’s painter. He revels in technique and savours the moment when he can find the medium and the process to evoke the infinite, the unreachable and the timeless.

He uses his camera extensively to capture the nuances of tone, structure and colour in land and sea that he uses for reference in his paintings. ‘I take my camera with me everywhere,’ he said, ‘and look for images in the viewfinder that look like one of my paintings.’5

This statement focuses the qualities of Langlois’ work that intrigue the viewer. These are not landscapes and seascapes in the super-real or photographic style. Here is the sublime – as pursued by the great romantic painters of the nineteenth century.

As art critic Elwyn Lynn once said, ‘Behind many a landscape painting lie the metaphysics of the endurance of the revered.’6

1 “Just add people”, Rodney Chester, The Courier Mail, 16 July 2002.

2  Ibid.

3 Newcastle Region Art Gallery, 2002.

4 Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, 2003.

5 “Far Horizons,” Phil Brown, Brisbane News, 17 July 2002.

6 “The metaphysics of landscapes,” Elwyn Lynn, The Weekend Australian, 3 August 1985.