In the early 1960s, Charles Gagnon entered a period of sustained experimentation that would shape the direction of his subsequent work. After spending several years in New York, where he encountered the varied approaches to painting that had emerged in the postwar period, Gagnon returned to Montreal in 1960. His paintings from these years reflect an evolving interest in abstraction, particularly in the capacity of paint to register movement, atmosphere, and the experience of looking.

Landscape remained an important point of reference, although its presence became increasingly elusive. Forms appear through shifting fields of colour and texture, while the organization of the surface produces a sense of depth that is at times difficult to locate. In certain works, the interplay of dark and light passages suggests unsettled weather or the changing conditions of a landscape. These associations remain open-ended, emerging through the viewer’s engagement with the painting rather than through a clearly defined subject.

Gagnon’s approach belongs to a broader postwar reconsideration of the relationship between painting and the visible world. Yet his interests extended beyond the expressive possibilities of the painted mark. He was attentive to the ways images are formed, perceived, and remembered, and to the traces through which meaning might be suggested. His paintings often retain a tension between the suggestion of a recognizable place and an arrangement of forms that resists identification. This ambiguity gives the surface an active role: the eye moves between passages of paint, testing relationships and searching for points of orientation.

The Storm After was subsequently included in Charles Gagnon: Works 1956–1978, the major retrospective organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1978. Travelling to four additional Canadian institutions, the exhibition brought Gagnon’s work to a wider audience and situated his early experiments within the development of his mature practice. Its inclusion offers a historical perspective on a period in which he was redefining the possibilities of abstraction and establishing concerns that would continue to inform his work over the following decades.