Charles Paradis

Charles Paradis is a Montreal-based painter of Québéco-Vietnamese descent, whose work stages the fragile order of carefully constructed spaces. Built like small models, the compositions of his paintings combine furniture, landscape, and light in a calm that borders on the unnatural.

His practice explores the fabrication of ideal spaces and the quiet uncanniness that forms within them. Memory functions as both reference and structure, guiding how these scenes are assembled. Each painting gathers fragments of comfort such as the quiet atmosphere of Quebec landscapes, soft natural lights, and familiar elements of design, bringing them together into a setting that feels inviting yet slightly apprehensive. Beneath this process lies a quiet desire to contain those “perfect” spaces, to hold onto the sense of balance and warmth they promise. By constructing them, he seeks a form of escape, a way to re-enter environments where comfort feels possible, even if only through illusion. Each work becomes a means of possession, a built setting that allows him to linger within the calm that is created.

Influenced by scenography, collage, and trompe-l’œil, Paradis approaches painting as a way to test how illusion can stay intact while revealing its own artifice. The surface hovers between depth and flatness, turning the image into both depiction and object, a contained space where emotion and design quietly meet.