This is your brain on cartoons: The pencil crayon surrealism of Mathieu Larone

When Mathieu Larone was a kid, cartoons were the lingua franca. They were ambient and they were everywhere. Bugs Bunny, Fred Flintstone, Garfield — even a generation or two past their debuts, they could be found daily on television screens, t-shirts and lunchboxes. The young Larone didn't have to seek them out; rather, they "just sort of seeped into" him.

He remembers feeling a kind of magic from certain cartoons. "They could transmit really weird feelings without even talking to me." Eventually, the Montreal-based artist, who's drawn as long as he can remember, found that his own work could perform the same magic. 

The 28-year-old illustrator's art has appeared in music videos, as scenic design for theatre and has been commissioned by prestigious literary magazines. Now, Larone is the subject of his first-ever solo exhibition. Night Visions at the Latcham Art Centre in Stouffville, Ont., presents more than 100 drawings and animations made, astonishingly, in just the past four years. With the gallery lights dimmed to perpetual twilight — the hour of shadow and mystery at the edge of darkness — Larone's peculiar Prismacolor worlds enchant, mystify and reach deep into your mind to poke at some of its oldest, most rudimentary constructions. 

The images look familiar, but unsettling. Haunted even. They recall Elmer Fudd's forest hunting grounds, Tweety Bird's dining room or the Sonoran spires and mesas of Wile E. Coyote, where you can practically smell the dynamite. Devoid the trademark characters, however, the scenes are eerily charged with possibility. The stage is set, the props are ready, but we're left to calculate the gag. And with that action withheld — the inevitable kaboom! — the settings themselves become powerful shorthand for the feelings we anticipate: the fear, danger, deviousness, folly, calamity and ruin.

Instead of the famous rooster or pig or Tasmanian devil, Larone has developed his own cryptic panoply of symbols that populate the scenery — with ladders, plumes of smoke, water wells, lightning bolts, witch's hats and circus tents. He inserts these familiar objects in ways they don't quite belong, making the scene feel volatile and off-kilter, or as the artist puts it: "alien." The symbols themselves don't represent anything, he says, at least not in a simple, one-to-one way; rather, they function to invite our "pattern-seeking brains" into action. Larone wants us to want to make sense of the objects he's assembled, when really, there's no grand narrative or top-down meaning as such. "I think life is incredibly uneasy and nuanced and weird," he says. "[The drawings] come from a daily feeling of not really understanding."

Recently, the artist has begun coming to terms with the fact that he may be a surrealist. The first time a friend accused him of this, he says, it felt "like a punch in the face." He does not like Salvador Dali. (And, to be fair, his work better recalls the architectural fantasies of the Italian proto-surrealist Giorgio de Chirico — if de Chirico ever nine-to-fived at Hanna-Barbera.) But the mission of his artwork is patently surreal: he makes the familiar appear unfamiliar. And he does this in a way that makes the viewer question what they are looking at and why it makes them feel the way it does, traipsing into the psychological terrain of mood, memory, emotion and the subconscious mind. 

Like he'd noted about the American golden age animations his work now alludes to, Larone also wants to transmit feelings by reaching into the viewers' brains and "hitting the right buttons." That his strange drawings can so easily provoke a deep emotional response suggests something important about  the media we watch in childhood and how it indelibly colours the building blocks of our minds. That is: We learn formative lessons in the concepts of fear, danger, surprise and joy from the hijinks of Bugs Bunny & Friends — and this is the same fundamental material Larone has learned to manipulate so adeptly.

Ultimately, what the artist's work reflects are his own feelings. "I think what I'm drawing is people," he says, "like my relationship with people." It's a conversation he conducts through scenery and objects meant to evoke various emotions in a sort of tone poem. By abandoning everyday logic, he invites viewers to deconstruct his images and dig within themselves to find the constituent parts that make them feel the way they do. It's an ethos one might take from Larone's art and extend well beyond it. If you question what things are, he says, you may see the world for what it really is. "And I think true feeling comes from that." 

The Latcham exhibition ends on a rather unusual work — completely uncharacteristic of everything that's preceded it. On a tiny rectangle of card stock, the artist has marked the words "As-tu trouvé ce que tu cherchais?" or "Did you find what you were looking for?" The design found its way onto a band t-shirt, but as this coda, it is especially apt. The mysterious work of Larone provides no answers, but he will give you so much to find.

Mathieu Larone's Night Vision is on view at the Latcham Art Centre in Stouffville, Ont., through March 16.