‍You really should go see Claude St-Jacques’s intriguing and captivating paintings at Galerie Estampe Plus. Under the title Recent Works (the artist dislikes overly specific titles, finding them too limiting), the exhibition features nearly twenty canvases depicting female bodies painted against earthy backgrounds—sometimes coppery, blood-red, honey-toned, or glowing.

‍The pleasure of viewing these paintings is accompanied by a curious sense of unease. Standing before them, the visitor feels projected into the center of a scene where the action has already begun.

‍We become spectators of a kind of autobiographical journal, where bodies weave together fragments of a search for personal identity. “I love painting at night while everyone is asleep. I like to paint spontaneously, without regard for the passage of time,” confides the artist.

‍Headless, armless, footless female bodies create a kind of metamorphosis that seems to unfold endlessly before our eyes. St-Jacques invites us into a poetic universe. Why no heads or arms? “What interests me is the inner life of the body, so that I may reach the soul. Feet, heads, and arms bring me too close to portraiture and to the outward appearance of a figure,” says the Montreal painter.

‍This, then, is an art in search of identity—a painting filtered through the perceptions of the artist’s own body, as though it were that of a stranger. Possessing the enchanting charm of a fable, Claude St-Jacques’s works are guided by the unconsciousness of the night, but also by words—unrelated words—which she inscribes here and there on the canvas.

‍“I begin with the idea that every body has a story,” she explains. “Isn’t that, in itself, a way of bearing witness to the human condition?”