Baptiste Laurent - Rumbos berbères

"Berber Routes", XXL 200x150cm, acrylic on paper, 2017.
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, National Museum of Anthropology, 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 syncretize
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

Exit Series/
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 Anthropológico 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 Anthropológico 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