Claude MarQuis's abstract painting practice emerged in 2008 as a sustained investigation into aerial perspective, cartographic form, and the visual grammar of landscape seen from above. Working in mixed media on wood and large canvas, MarQuis developed a distinctive formal language — intricate grids of lines and squares, layered in colour and texture — evoking the sensation of flight over cities, fields, and territories. He called them abstract aerial landscapes: compositions that compress geography into pattern, and pattern into an almost meditative density of mark-making, some works containing upwards of one hundred individually coloured squares.

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The series launched publicly at Mercury Lounge, Ottawa, in a dual exhibition coinciding with the release of his Stereo Stereo CD — an early marker of the cross-disciplinary practice that would define his career. The initial body of work comprised six large-scale mixed media paintings on wood, each approaching door-sized dimensions. Over the following fifteen years, MarQuis would produce more than sixty large-scale abstracts, including a concentrated series of over thirty works at 48×48 inches — a scale that allows the compositional logic of the aerial grid to assert itself with full spatial authority.

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The work entered public and commercial contexts throughout this period. MarQuis maintained an ongoing relationship with Kevin Dodd Gallery, Ottawa, where paintings from the series were regularly offered for sale and prominently featured in the gallery's street-facing window displays.

A dedicated series was also installed as signature decor throughout Play Food and Wine, one of Ottawa's landmark dining destinations, where the vertical paintings lined the restaurant's full interior.

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In 2023, MarQuis brought this chapter of his practice to a close, pivoting toward queer figurative work — two of his figurative pieces now in the permanent collection of the Ottawa Art Gallery. The abstract aerial landscapes remain a defining achievement: a fifteen-year commitment to a single formal proposition, pursued at scale and with rigorous consistency.