Using acrilics, she paints extremely sensitive pictures, clearly influenced by the orient and in particular Japan, where she has spent time in Zen monasteries.

In fact, it would be more accurate to say that her art expresses her intimate feelings, which she has also put into words in a long poem. The different elements of the poem, describing a range of contemplating emotions, are the inspiration for the paintings.

Examining these paintings, one has the impression of looking out a large window onto a world that is always sunny, bathed in beauty, inhabited by birds flitting around a fountain. Too beautiful to be true, you say? And yet it certainly seems to exist for Mimie Langlois.

She says or suggests all this with a very sparse style. Her range of emotions is expressed by whirls of colour sketched on a white background - a few simple thin lines, ressembling a flat encephalogram, indicate the onset of a period of inner calm, while dreamy periods are portrayed by curved lines, and slashes are employed to signify exuberance. All this is merely suggested, modestly expressed on the white canvas, as if the artist had wished to thank the Gods for favours received down here on Earth without attracting the attention of any evil spirits. This attitude, this way of putting her emotions down on canvas, even in expressing the unspeakable, clearly points to Oriental influences

Yet Mimie Langlois, age 61, is not Oriental, she's from right here. All these Oriental traits in her work stem from her childhood and the happy times she spent with her grandmother and great-aunt, admiring the porcelain and lacquer objects d'art they had brought back from voyages to China and Japan. In her early years, she was immersed in the cult of beauty, so familiar to geishas. She then went on to study painting with Frère Jérôme, a rather rebellious religious figure, having spent time with Borduas. The tumultuous days of 1967 found her at the plastic arts department of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). She became actively involved and, as a woman, wanted to participate in bringing about a new order and encourage other women to realize their full potential.

In so doing, she distanced herself from the Japan she loves so much, and which still lags behind in this social context. She carried her incursion into traditionally male domains very far, even to the extent of earning a black belt in karate. Mimie Langlois, the geisha, became a samurai. And as if her karate were not enough to prove her fearlessness and readiness to play for high stakes, she next turned to scuba diving under ice!

This is the way the artist appears in her paintings: fragile and determined. Her work has nothing of the dilettante about it, but rather an inner search for the meaning of life. Its very starkness leads the viewer to think about the essence of passing time. Are we living our daily lives to the fullest? This is that she asks, through the paintings in this exhibition and the accompanying poetry, which is in fact entitled "One Day". And whatever the answer, it takes a great deal of courage simply to ask the question. If we are dissatisfied with our own answers, it means that we must live the present in some other way, in harmony with ourselves, even if it means taking risks...