Artists have a responsibility to elevate their work above the quotidian. There is a difference between painting the walls of houses and making paintings that will hang on gallery walls. What that difference is can be difficult to discern since the process and materials are indistinguishable. Perhaps it is the attitude. It is incumbent upon artists to have a serious attitude — to approach what they do with a degree of sincerity. And above all, it is the artist’s duty to revere their chosen form.

“I love art,” the young painter Alexei Kolakis-Landon declares as we leaf together through a book of works by Fra Angelico. “I love abstract painting. I love figurative painting. I love Renaissance painting. I love cave painting. Which one should I keep open?” he asks, flipping pages at random. I have discovered that Kolakis-Landon likes to paint with something stimulating in view: an open book, a mood board, a pile of images torn from magazines. “It’s less for inspiration,” he says, “more so when I’m not looking at the painting I’m looking at something else.”

Kolakis-Landon’s enthusiasm for everything of a creative nature practically detonates like buckshot as he speaks to me in his studio, a tiny windowless space in the De Gaspé building, a coveted address on the Montreal artist real-estate map that is the home of studios belonging to the likes of Janet Werner and Marie Davidson among many others.

Words tumble out of him in staccato bursts, jumping mid-sentence from topic to topic, betraying an impressive knowledge of not just art history but also cinema, literature, fashion, photography, gastronomy. I ask him where he studied art and he shoots back teasingly, “the university of none of your damn business.”

Kolakis-Landon also refuses to divulge his age. “Guess,” he says. “If you guess, I’ll tell you if you’re right or wrong.” 23 I offer, to a blank stare. “It’s enough to say that I’m an emerging artist,” he replies. “It’s the cheapest my work will ever be.”

Born and raised in Montreal, Kolakis-Landon spent time as a child with his parents, both practicing artists, in Germany and France before relocating back to the Golden Square Mile. “There are so many brilliant artists that have come out of Montreal. It’s a super creative city. Everyone is connected. Everyone’s an artist, all my friends. Whenever we hang out, we just talk about art and culture and life. It’s something within the magical nature of the city.”

In June 2026, Kolakis-Landon and kindred spirit Tomas Dessureault independently mounted a tandem three-day exhibition entitled Ceremony in a derelict Outremont warehouse. The sprawling space consisted of multiple chambers reminiscent of the recent film The Backrooms, attracting a who’s who of Montreal musicians, curators, fellow visual artists, and art aficionados.

Dessureault and Kolakis-Landon’s practices, both over-productive and brimming with passion, perfectly complemented each other, and Ceremony was far and away the spring season’s most unmissable art event, marking the pair as artists to watch. “I’m just happy that my friends showed up,” he reflects. “It’s good to feel not alone.”

When he is not in the studio, Kolakis-Landon can frequently be found at the hippest art galleries visiting must-see vernissages and soaking up the scene’s restless energy. The sense that there is no alternative to art making for Kolakis-Landon is what strikes me most about his frantic and relentless vibe. “I think everyone should be making art. It you’re not making art you should go look at art. I think without art we’re totally screwed. Without art we’d stop thinking, we’d stop questioning, we’d stop being curious. And when you stop being curious about the world around you, you die.”

For the past few years, Kolakis-Landon has been engaged deeply in producing a body of work that speaks directly to the material qualities of paint. His inimitable style invokes some obvious influences, like Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, or Francis Bacon, and others less so, including the British sculptor Bill Woodrow’s Two Blue Car Doors, proliferating the suggestion of violence.

Whether painting on canvas, paper, or copper, Kolakis-Landon’s visual works are equally studious and cavalier. “Everything I do is punk,” he says. “Even when I try to do something elegant and clean and all that, it still turns out fucking punk.” His process is neither academic nor anti-intellectual; whether consciously or not, he strikes a bit of a bête-comme-un-peintre pose. But there is an unmistakable undercurrent in his oeuvre to date of confronting chaos and monstrosity with intent.

“It’s about surrendering to the paper and the paint,” he explains, “letting the paint drip, letting it work the way it wants to work. With the paint being so liquid, there’s always something different. If I put a lot of very thin paint at the top of the canvas, that means it’s going to drip down. And there could be a gesture that I find gorgeous, absolutely sublime, that could get destroyed in a matter of seconds. What’s interesting to me is the fact that’s it’s always shifting. I try to tighten it up, but I want it to stay ambiguous. Mostly because the body is also very ambiguous.”

The interstice of representational ambiguity and corporeal brutality is Kolakis-Landon’s territory. He affords the works their own agency, a generous act and king move all at once. “The paintings are very temperamental,” he offers. “They have their own mind, their own body. That’s what my process is about.”

How do you know when a painting is finished? I ask. “It’s the hardest part,” he replies. “It’s the most difficult part of painting. I don’t.”

For Kolakis-Landon, painting is a diaristic practice. It allows him the space for introspection, interrogation, projection, and memory. “The best work is when I’m not thinking and it happens naturally,” he says. “When I’m just kind of free of any kind of clutter in my brain. Sometimes when I look at older work, even work from six months ago, I want to go up and touch it, and I start to remember what it was like making it. That’s the sensual aspect of making it. Looking at the drips and the scratches and remembering things about myself in the work.”

I survey the studio. In the corner is a white folding table upon which tubes of paint and spray bottles, a jar containing various brushes, and dinner plates caked with dried paint are neatly arranged. I remark about the everydayness of the tools of the trade. “My Betty Crocker bowls are super useful,” he quips.

We stand before a nine-by-five-foot canvas stretched and stapled to the wall. Upon it, splashes of crimson tones explode like the aftermath of a Patrick Bateman massacre. On the floor is a pair of sneakers that might be mistaken for evidence from a crime scene. It is impossible not to infer the intimation of plasma in Kolakis-Landon’s work, although he quickly denies this analysis.

“I wouldn’t describe them as violent,” he tells me. “They’re more about me thinking about the body and how a stain or a drip or a blotch can correlate to the body. I’m not against the violent interpretation of it,” he concedes. “But I don’t mean it as that. I’m not trying to represent anything. There’s no narrative. I’m just trying to present the truth.”

While death may be life’s most unavoidable fact, it is decidedly vitality that vibrates through his vision. “Making art is me processing my lived experience,” Kolakis-Landon says. “It’s my life. It’s the most meditative and the most important aspect of my life. It’s like drinking or breathing. It’s just something I have to do. Painting is the one thing that brings me back to reality. It makes me feel like everything is going to be okay.”◼︎