Baptiste Laurent - Les Trois métamorphoses

"Les Trois métamorphoses", 150x110cm, acrylic on paper, 2015.
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 Antropología, 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",
hes 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.

Ibere Nation Series: First obsession: filling the surface mechanically and cold with a basic work criterion. With a graphic element of the most elementary, a stroke with a marker, from left to right, from top to bottom, until the lines cover the surface. The purpose is to fill everything, and the criterion is to do it in the least rigid way to reach a complete surface. The process is carried out with the greatest application, starting from an intuitive line, by freehand. No matter how careful it is. it leaves room for failure. Repeating until filling the frame, and assuming errors, allows me to enter a mental state that is particularly empty, but concentrated, or in a state of true scratch. Second obsession after a long and hard winter, between physical hibernation and intellectual boredom, what better for me than reading the speeches of Zarathustra down his mountain? Write them! The succession of letters and words without spaces turns out to be the most elementary graphic from to put in tune with my first obsession. Odd way to read Nietzsche writing it. Zarathustra’s speeches deserve to be read again and again as a parable told by the prophet. Thus spoke Zarathustra is also a parody of religious texts. Animal metaphors and the solemn speech of Zarathustra do not seem easy to understand in a first reading. But what is clear is that Nietzsche tries to present to the world a new ethic. In front of a world in crisis or asleep where god has died, and propose to man a way out of what anesthetized state, the opportunity to overcome that void by becoming a superman. For me it turned out to be a very interesting exercise, both in the form that serves as a vehicle and in the content of the message. Emerged from an empty moment, in a long winter, of a Spain crisis, I found it tempting to put this series on the title of Ibère Nation.