Stéphane Mallarmé: “Man can be a democrat; the artist splits himself in two and must remain an aristocrat.”

This exhibition brings together the latest artistic project by Baptiste Laurent (Nantes, 1980), who has been living in Spain for more than fifteen years, revealing the tragedy imposed at the end of the celebration of the international order.

Laurent seeks to revitalize his painting by declining his roots and incorporating local symbols of Spanish culture, such as the universe of skulls from the Conquest of Latin America and Andalusian painting. In the internal struggle of his creative process, he critically confronts his painting with hunting, war, and French national identity in the European and international context, which here take on the role of protagonists.

Through the metaphor of the circus, soccer, merry-go-rounds, and amusement parks, the artist ironically caricatures show business, transforming culture, politics, and the construction of national identity into a carnival. The triumph of social media, the frivolity of democratic life, and the trivialization of art and literature have turned cultural experience into an inescapable need for entertainment. He legitimizes the popular while seeking a plastic and intellectual ideal capable of expressing the highest human emotions and feelings, in resonance with the mythology of dreams, where past, present, and future merge in the face of the frenetic unfolding of the international tragedy of wars and colonial memory that surround the West.

By linking his work to the world of his childhood, he reinvents the myths of the Wild West and the noble savage to explore a nameless idea, where masks impose a dramatic feeling on history and where dreams of glory are betrayed. From the depths of his being and childhood memories, he reorganizes the dimension of bodies, animals, and objects, giving the miniatures a disproportionate and theatrical grandeur.

His capacity for imagination imbues the spectacle of the contemporary landscape with a mystery within the course of history, reaffirming the construction of gender roles and transforming the individual past into a collective experience, permeated by his masculine concerns. The theatricality of his large paintings transports him into mystical reveries, where he expresses his poetry in harmony with his social concerns.

By mixing opposing elements, he weaves links between his intimate world and the contemporary world through symbolic figuration, the versatility of canons, singular brushstrokes, the gesturality of forms, the mixture of techniques (drawing, painting, and sculpture), the free use of color, humor, the grotesque, and the reappropriation of his imaginary universe. Baptiste Laurent paints as he wishes: it is a fundamental need. His painting transgresses the classical order of transcendental and canonical representation of norms, oscillating between sadness and joy, while awakening the viewer’s empathy.