Baptiste Laurent - Vagues bleues

"Blue Waves", 90x90cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018. Signed on back. Sold unframed, shipped rolled.

Artist bio/
Baptiste Laurent (1980, Nantes) is a visual artist who lives and works in Madrid and Paris. He has exhibited at various artistic and cultural institutions, including the Institut français de Madrid, Le Palais de Tokyo, Galeria La Caja, Esquina Nua, Espacio Seara, Gazzambo Gallery, Alliance française, Museo Nacional de Anthropología, Galeria FL. His traditional medium is painting, but he also works in sculpture and develops projects with a strong literary, social and anthropological component. In his latest publications and exhibitions, "Conversaciones y puñetazos", "Mauvaises Tournures", "Bajo el Mismo Mar" and "Exit", he has repeatedly experimented with collaborative creative work with other visual artists and literary authors. As an anti-academic and eclectic artist, he likes to syncretise pictorial styles, oscillating between neo-figurative narrative, graphic painting and expressionist abstraction. Founder of the 'Latolier' shared studio in Madrid's Usera district, he leads a dynamic community of Spanish and international visual artists.

Série Exit/
Exit is a series of plastic works and a book that have been the subject of three exhibitions, at the Alliance Française de Madrid, the Museo Antropológico de Madrid and the Gazzambo Gallery in 2018 and 2019. Balanced between paintings and sculptures, the Exit series is a pictorial and imaginary account of the migrant's journey, exile and ultimate success. The sculptures were created around a workshop at the Museo Antropológico de Madrid, in collaboration with Senegalese immigrants in Madrid. Mame Mbaye (one of the participants in this workshop), a street vendor, died of a heart attack while being chased through the streets of Madrid by the police. This tragic event triggered a popular revolt in the Lavapiés neighborhood. As a tribute to Mame Mbaye, the series refers to the collection of plaster casts of indigenous faces exhibited in the Anthropological Museum. This confrontation contrasts with formal evocations of social science sculpture, traditional ceramic sculpture, death masks, orientalist art and trophies. The impact of this mixture of contradictory effects attempts to reflect the paradoxes of the reception of refugees in Europe. Without the rigour that characterises the anthropologist's or the scientist's approach, but imitating their processes, the aim is to sketch a subjective sample of the new human figures living in Europe.