Aline Setton’s paintings begin with the language of architecture but resist its logic. Walls, windows, terraces, pools, columns and passageways suggest spaces that might be entered or inhabited, yet these structures never fully resolve into coherent places.
Aline Setton’s paintings begin with the language of architecture but resist its logic. Walls, windows, terraces, pools, columns and passageways suggest spaces that might be entered or inhabited, yet these structures never fully resolve into coherent places. Instead, fragments of architecture, landscape and image are assembled into environments that hover between the familiar and the imagined. Perspective shifts, planes overlap, and openings lead not necessarily into another room, but into another pictorial possibility.
Throughout this new body of work, Setton uses architecture as a framework through which to examine how images construct space. A curtain, a tiled surface, a distant horizon, vegetation or a glimpse of water can operate simultaneously as representation and as compositional device. In Slicing the Spectrum, the landscape is fractured into a dense sequence of vertical and curved planes. In Poolside, the apparent clarity of a modernist exterior is disrupted by shifts in scale and perspective. Elsewhere, the distinction between interior and exterior becomes increasingly porous: landscapes appear through openings, surfaces behave like windows, and architectural elements become almost abstract fields of colour.
Setton’s paintings draw the viewer in through their apparent architectural clarity, only to gradually destabilize that first impression. She borrows the visual vocabulary of modernist architecture, with its clean geometries, expansive glazing, dramatic cantilevers and carefully orchestrated relationship between building and landscape. Yet she unsettles the promise of order traditionally associated with that language. Her spaces contain contradictions that would be impossible to reconcile architecturally but remain entirely convincing pictorially. The eye is repeatedly invited to move into the painting, only to encounter another plane, another interruption, another image.
This tension between coherence and fragmentation is central to Setton’s practice. Rather than depicting existing architecture, she constructs spaces through painting, combining observation, memory and invention into environments governed by their own internal logic. The resulting works have the atmosphere of remembered places: specific enough to feel recognizable, yet unstable enough to resist identification. They suggest the way memory itself reorganizes space, retaining a colour, a surface, a view or a particular quality of light while allowing everything around it to shift.
Setton’s first solo exhibition at Duran Contemporain follows the gallery’s solo presentation of her work at Art Toronto in 2025. The enthusiastic response to that presentation introduced her work to a broader Canadian audience. This exhibition expands that encounter considerably. Seen together, these paintings reveal a practice in which architecture is less a subject than a means of thinking about perception itself: about how we assemble fragments into spaces, how images shape our understanding of place, and how painting can make an impossible world feel, momentarily, entirely inhabitable.
