Baptiste Laurent - Ride in the storm

"Ride in the storm", 42x30cm, 2023 aquarela e tinta chinesa sobre papel
Assinado no verso, enviado enrolado.

Série (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,
fom 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) é um artista visual que vive e trabalha
em Madrid e Paris.
Ele tem exposto em várias instituições artísticas e culturais,
incluindo o 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.
Seu meio tradicional é a pintura, mas ele também trabalha em escultura
e desenvolve projetos com uma forte componente literária, social e
antropológica.
Em suas últimas publicações e exposições, "Conversaciones y
puñetazos", "Mauvaises Tournures", "Bajo el Mismo Mar" e "Exit",
ele tem repetidamente experimentado com trabalhos criativos colaborativos
com outros artistas visuais e autores literários.
Como artista anticênico e eclético, gosta de sincretizar
estilos pictóricos, oscillando entre narrativa neo-figurativa, pintura gráfica
e abstração expressionista.
Fundador do estúdio compartilhado 'Latolier' no bairro Usera, de Madrid, ele
conduz uma comunidade dinâmica de artistas visuais espanhóis e internacionais.