Martine Lafont
Martine Lafont paints the world by capturing what and who remains just outside the frame.
Born in Strasbourg in 1952 and now based in Paris, Lafont is a French contemporary artist trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and ENSAAMA. She began her career creating monumental murals for theatre and public architecture before moving into scenography and visual communication. Today, she is devoted entirely to painting.
Her years living in Iran and Argentina profoundly shaped her artistic vision, instilling a lasting attraction to the unknown and a deep appreciation for cultural diversity. These influences echo throughout her work.
Lafont’s paintings are built on absence, intimacy, and the unseen. She draws on raw, essential emotions while deliberately leaving figures outside the frame, allowing only their traces to remain. This approach is central to her celebrated series of beds, where unmade sheets evoke the “angels’ share”—life evaporated yet condensed into memory and gesture.
The elusive is at the heart of her current research. Inspired by fleeting views from a train window at 320 km/h, she captures unique, unrepeatable arrangements of landscape and light—moments that vanish as quickly as they appear.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
2014 ParisArtistes, galerie rue Amelot - Paris | 2013 Village des arts, Le Vesinet | 2000 Martine Lafont peintures, Hôtel de Villaines La Châtre | 2000 Lits, rue de la Boétie Paris | 1997 eau dedans, eau dehors, galerie Jean Mussot rue Popincourt 75011
Martine Lafont lives and works in Paris, France.
Interview:
‘‘The elusive, we find him in my current research when I look out the window of a train carried away. Of course, the subject does not have time to take the break and the easel becomes useless: 320 km/hour, it is the space-time I need to grasp the hazards of these improbable arrangements that you will not see again.’’
