Evolving landscape painting as a metaphor for freedom
This week we welcome Laurena Finéus (she/her), a Haitian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Finéus works primarily in painting, performance and social practice, such as wellness workshops for Haitian migrants in collaboration with a trauma therapist. Her art centers on representations of Black geographies, maroon thought and migratory histories depicted through an array of painterly, imagined landscapes.
The teachings of Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot in “Silencing the Past” inform her understanding of visual narration. Finéus’ strategies include the collapsing of history in order to question its production and mechanisms.
I first encountered Laurena’s work in the 2025 group exhibition “Mad Heart, Be Brave,” curated by Sadaf Padder at the Fridman Gallery in Manhattan. Her paintings have an almost hallucinatory quality in which swirling forms and washes of color gradually reveal a dense landscape that enmeshes flora, fauna and the occasional figure, as if reclaiming the territory.
Finéus graduated from the University of Ottawa with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2020 and from Columbia University as a Master of Fine Arts in 2024. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y., the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa and Art Mûr in Montreal among others. She is part of a range of private and public collections internationally including the Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Ottawa’s Art Collection and Google. She is the recipient of the Saunderson Prize, the Ottawa Arts Council IBPOC Emerging Artists Award and the Ineke Harmina Standish Memorial Prize and grants from the Helen Frankenthaler Fund and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. As an educator, she has facilitated a range of workshops for the Ottawa Art Gallery, Arts Network Ottawa, Haitian Americans United for Progress, Diaspora Community Services and l’Association Canadienne-Française de l’Ontario.
Finéus’ first NYC solo exhibition, “Cautionary Tales: A Symphony of Anger/Kòlè,” has recently opened at Fridman Gallery in Manhattan and will be on view through June 19. From the press release:
“Balancing between abstraction and realism, Haitian-Canadian painter Laurena Finéus captures a liminal, evolving landscape as a metaphor for our enduring quest for freedom. Her layered surfaces, rendered in oils, ink, pigment and acrylic on canvas, mimic the lush, rugged terrain and dense forests found in Maroon geographies, made treacherous by seasonal rains, flooding and poor infrastructure. The intricate linework painted over abstract color fields creates depth of perception and resembles rhizomatic structures, symbolizing communal labor and regrowth of a landscape laid barren by earthquakes. Plants and elements referenced in Finéus’ work carry specific meanings: scattered magnolia seeds — once thought extinct in Haiti — embody fragility and endurance; fire symbolizes a painful yet regenerative process of liberation; pigeon pea and breadfruit seeds suggest fertility. Her practice explores displacement, environmental collapse and transformation, inspired by Édouard Glissant’s concept of chaos-monde —a world shaped by unpredictability and constant change — framing instability as both rupture and rebirth.”
See more of Laurena’s work on her website and Instagram.
