Baptiste Laurent - Jambes assises

"Jambes assises", 50x35cm, 2023 akvarell och kinesisk tusch på papper
Signerad på baksidan, skickas rullad.

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) är en visuell konstnär som bor och arbetar
i Madrid och Paris.
Han har ställt ut vid olika konstnärliga och kulturella institutioner,
inklusive 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.
Hans traditionella medium är måleri, men han arbetar också med skulptur
och utvecklar projekt med en stark litterär, social och
antropologisk komponent.
I sina senaste publikationer och utställningar, "Conversaciones y
puñetazos", "Mauvaises Tournures", "Bajo el Mismo Mar" och "Exit",
har han upprepade gånger experimenterat med samarbetsinriktat kreativitetsarbete
med andra visuella konstnärer och litterära författare.
Som en antia-kademisk och eklektisk konstnär gillar han att synkretisera
bildspråk, växlande mellan neo-figurativ berättarteckning, grafiskt
måleri och expressionistisk abstraktion.
Ground av det 'Latolier' delade ateljén i Madrids Usera-distrikt, han
leder en dynamisk gemenskap av spanska och internationella visuella
konstnärer