Across the Water: François Xavier Saint Pierre’s Italian Canvases in London

On a grey summer morning, Canadian painter François Xavier Saint Pierre stands in the courtyard of London’s Royal Academy, his name newly added to the Summer Exhibition’s roster, by invite of former Royal Academy president Sir Christopher LeBrun. Artists gather beneath gilded statues, waiting for the procession to St. James’s Church—a tradition that has marked the start of this annual show since the 18th century. For Saint Pierre, the invitation to exhibit in London is more than ceremony: “You walk these galleries and realize you’re sharing walls with painters you’ve studied your whole life,” he says.

Saint Pierre’s formation as an artist began at Concordia University in Montreal, under the guidance of Yves Gaucher and Guido Molinari—two mavericks who pushed Canadian painting into the realm of rigorous abstraction, far from the old-world traditions that now surround him in London. “They taught me to question every gesture, every decision on the canvas,” he says.

François Xavier Saint Pierre installation at Palazzo Borghese, Rome in 2023. Photo by Maris Mazulis

 

Toronto followed, with years spent teaching, exhibiting, and earning national attention as a finalist in the 2006 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Even as his reputation grew in Canada, Saint Pierre found himself drawn toward Europe’s deeper histories. “Canada gave me my foundation,” he says, “but Italy is where the questions started multiplying.”

Venice became his home during the pandemic. With the city emptied of tourists, Saint Pierre paid close attention to the changing light, the weather, and the way history lingers in the streets. “Venice is a place where art and daily life blur,” he says. “The weather changes everything—the colours, the mood, the way you see.” His painting shifted: brushwork loosened, colours became more atmospheric, and his focus turned to how memory and place intertwine.

Villa With Obelisk and Umbrella Pine (red) by François Xavier Saint Pierre. Oil on canvas. 56 x 38 cm (2025).

A 2016 residency at Rome’s Villa Medici contributed another layer. There, surrounded by classical gardens and fragments of antiquity, Saint Pierre began the two companion paintings now on view in London: Villa With Obelisk and Umbrella Pine (red) and Villa With Obelisk and Umbrella Pine (blue-grey). These works are not straightforward landscapes but imagined spaces where the past is always present, never quite resolved. “Rome and Venice are both cities where the past is visible, but never settled,” he says.

That idea—of history as something that shifts and persists—finds a fitting stage at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.

Here, works by contemporary artists—including Dame Tracey Emin and Georg Baselitz—are displayed, each painting responding to what came before and what hangs beside it. For Saint Pierre, the experience is humbling.

Villa With Obelisk and Umbrella Pine (blue grey) by François Xavier Saint Pierre. Oil on canvas. 56 x 38 cm (2025).

“To show in galleries where Titians and Caravaggios have hung is an opportunity not available to me in North America,” he says. “It’s not about joining a canon or chasing approval. It’s about entering a conversation that’s been going on for centuries—and hoping your voice adds something to the room.”

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition runs from June 17 to August 17, 2025.

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