Last year in the Gaspé Peninsula, Marc Séguin was fishing when he noticed the remains of old bridge piers on both sides of the river. His guide, an Anglo-Gaspésien whose family had known the Coffin family for generations, told him that it was from this bridge that Wilbert Coffin allegedly threw his gun after killing three American hunters in 1953. The dismembered bodies of the victims, like Coffin’s hunting camp, had been found just a few meters from where the artist was standing.

The Coffin case—guilty or not, the question remains a subject of debate to this day—has fascinated people for over seventy years. Séguin had known the story for a long time; but learning that he was standing, that morning, in thick fog, at the very site of the tragedy, changed the way he perceived the landscape. He immersed himself in the accounts from that era. In a 1987 news report, an elderly man summed up the entire affair in a single sentence: “Only nature knows the truth.”

From this experience emerged the Random Forest series, a collection of works in oil on canvas—a title borrowed from the famous algorithm of our time, but which here also refers to an entirely different form of knowledge: that of the trees and the forest, the only true witnesses to what happened.

These works embody a form of resilience—both gentle and violent—and convey an ambivalent atmosphere that is soothing at first glance yet slightly unsettling. Shrouded in mist, these paintings evoke a crime scene where light plays a central role.