"La Débacle" Painting

Eliane Saheurs traded one homeland of spectacular mountains for another, and found her artistic voice between ancient stability and endless change. Landscapes, variously abstracted, are her muse, and they crackle action and life. What the viewer sees is up to the viewer, as Saheurs, even at her most literal, makes no orders. Her scale and perspective fire the imagination, and only the artist’s reverence for our rugged land is indisputable.


by Peter Simpson March 2021

Eliane Saheurs came to painting through an early introduction to photography, where unexpected things happen in the process of making art, and sometimes make everything better.

When a young Saheurs worked with her father in his darkroom, and later in the field and darkroom with her mineralogist/geologist husband, she would have seen how curious shapes appear on fresh prints — those small but larger-than-life echos of dust, an eyelash hair, a smudge on a lens, or a tiny, Cohen-esque crack where the light gets in. The shapes were blemishes, but a blemish can beautify, like the right scar in the right place on the right face.

Those serendipitous glitches may have later inspired Saheurs, for such shapes energetically populate her paintings. Here it is not their origin but their purpose that’s inscrutable; who knows what intent is buried in those shapes, what emotions fire those vivid colours, what desires fuels those tireless motions? You can be certain only that the shapes are busy, at times frenetic in their energy, as they spin and fly in all directions.

Saheurs was born in Thun, Switzerland. She moved to Canada — trading one homeland of spectacular mountains for another with its own backbone of rock — and eventually she found painting as her artistic voice.

She moved to Ottawa in the 1980s and began a decade of study at Algonquin College and the Ottawa School of Art. She worked with names well-known in Ottawa — Blair Sharpe, Kathy Gillis, Jeff Stellick and others — and studied with artists who hailed from New York to New Mexico to Austria to Tokyo. Her work was included in Saatchi’s “Best of 2017” catalogue. It also hangs in the City of Ottawa’s collection, and in private collections across the city’s corporate, legal, political and diplomatic offices — including, not surprisingly, the Embassy of Switzerland.