Baptiste Laurent - Smoking Flowers

"Smoking Flowers", 109x86cm, XL,
2021 acrilico e posca su carta
Firmato sul retro, spedito arrotolato.

Serie (En)tropicos/
Days repeat themselves. A few months ago we lived
through an atypical moment. Our space is small and
time is long. We were overwhelmed by the lack of time,
but now we are surprised by the excess. An
introspective gesture, a new horizon, where we
approach our imagination. The perplexity of change, an
unprecedented cry asks "what now?
Baptiste uses this dystopian panorama to create
another dawn, a new dawn. The construction of these
paintings stems from a need to renew the landscape,
from a desire for forgotten nature. To rediscover it, to
revive it.
The stimulus for this symbiosis is to be found in the
story of the anthropologist and founder of
structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss: in 1935, Lévi-Strauss
set off in search of an authentic, pure Brazil, endowed
with a wild energy and a singular nature.
The author of "Tristes Tropiques" had partially fulfilled
his expectations of the journey. His anguish is
presented in a fragment of text with prophetic
overtones: "In a few hundred years, in this same place,
another traveller, as desperate as I am, will mourn the
disappearance of what I could have seen and which
escaped me". Victim of a double illness, everything I
see hurts me, and I reproach myself implacably for not
having looked hard enough.
Like a traveller, Baptiste's (en)tropical canvases lead
him to find a place where he can rediscover his vitality.
Perhaps these species do not exist, perhaps these
idyllic landscapes have never existed. But the window
Baptiste opens lets in the air that we can no longer
breathe today. Baptiste offers us a utopia; through his
gestures, he proposes a paradigm shift, a possible
ecology. For the Greeks, the word entropy had two
meanings: evolution and transformation. For physicists,
it is a measure of the disorder of a system. Identifying
disorder, transforming it

Baptiste Laurent (1980, Nantes) is a visual artist who live and work
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",
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