Queens of the Night, 2025

Laurent Anastay-Ponsolle  

In "Queens of the Night," Laurent Anastay-Ponsolle continues his visceral exploration of the body and desire, with a gestural intensity that is uniquely his. This oil on paper, with powerfully expressionistic accents, plunges us into a nocturnal atmosphere where intimacy becomes spectacle, and where sensuality flirts with strangeness.

Two women are depicted there, body to body, captured in a moment of suspended dance. Their barely sketched, almost anonymous faces accentuate the mystery and evocative power of their posture. The features are blurred, fragmented, as if their identity dissolves in the very act of moving, touching, vibrating against each other. The absence of a gaze directed at the viewer places the latter in the position of a witness — perhaps an intruder — of an intensely private but powerfully asserted moment.

The pictorial treatment, raw and instinctive, reinforces this carnal tension. Anastay-Ponsolle plays with materials, layers of oil, and transparencies, giving birth to volumes through the energy of the gesture rather than figurative detail. The pale flesh contrasts with the dark masses of clothing, highlighting the contrast between fragility and power. These outfits, clearly inspired by fetish aesthetics, evoke the cabaret, bondage, and a whole underground queer imaginary — but far from caricaturing, the artist sublimates. He gives these "queens of the night" a sovereign aura, blending desire, control, and surrender.

The background, saturated with warm browns and velvety blacks, is marked with graffiti: "QUEENS OF THE N !". This rough, almost scribbled inscription gives the work an urban touch, as if it had escaped from a wall in a Berlin or New York club. It acts as a manifesto, a claim of territory, gender, and presence. This is not a gentle night, but a night of struggle, of assumed power.

Here we find the great constants of Anastay-Ponsolle's work: the centrality of the body in tension, the fascination with fluid identities, the expressiveness of the line, and this singular way of transforming the intimate into a pictorial cry. "Queens of the Night" is a painting that does not seek to seduce; it imposes, it radiates. It captures the intensity of a fleeting moment of grace and magnifies it in a controlled brutality.