"Volcan fumée orange", 50x35cm, 2023 watercolour and chinese ink on paper Signed on the back, shipped rolled. 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", 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