Retour au village

The figure and its double are a recurring motif in the work of Jean Paul Lemieux, who used it as much for its symbolism as for its emotional impact. In Retour au village (around 1975), the double is subtly embodied in the painting’s two mobile subjects: first the car, which appears at the snowy road’s vanishing point, then the foreground figure toward which the vehicle is moving. The figure, truncated at the shoulders, stares straight ahead with eyes that shine like the car’s headlights—a clever imitation that triggers a narrative fuelled by the starkness of the setting. Will the driver stop to pick him up? Dream-like and deeply mysterious, Lemieux’s painting is cast in a wintry light that is buffered by a mass of superbly rendered clouds—a snowy sky that looms large over the diminutive car and distant cottages. This is the calm before the storm.
The painting’s pictorial elements are utterly emblematic of Lemieux’s repertoire: the heaving horizon line, the rural road draped in a blanket of snow, the rosy-cheeked figure bundled up in a fur coat and wool hat. Lemieux used many of these elements in his works from the 1970s and 1980s, notably in the urban nocturnal scene of Sans titre [La ville, la nuit] (around 1987), in which a man is approached by a car with its headlights on, Enfants dans un paysage de montagne (1980), featuring two foregrounded figures on a snowy road that winds through the mountains, and Une maison à la campagne (around 1973), his famous piece depicting a young woman walking along a country road through the fields. Retour au village carries on the pictorial tradition and major themes of Lemieux’s oeuvre.