Courage fuyons, 2020
Baptiste Laurent

(En) Trópicos

Text by Caio Cardial, curator:

I can't see the horizon from my window. The sun is setting and I don't know. The moon trembles in the glass opposite. The days repeat themselves. A few months ago, we experienced an atypical moment. Streaky, organized, busy, slippery time. Our space is reduced and time is lengthened. The lack of time overwhelmed us, now excess surprises us.

The everyday landscape is limited to the geometry of our windows. It was from there that at short intervals the light entered, but in a short time its traces and shadows disappeared. Living in a long space-time required an exercise of calm and reinvention. The noises from the street kept a lot of space for silence. An introspective gesture, a new horizon, where we got closer to our imagination. The perplexity of the change, an unprecedented cry asked us: "and now what?" Walk in short spaces to, little by little, see new scenarios.

Baptiste uses this dystopian panorama to create another dawn, a new dawn. The construction of these paintings was born from a need to renew the landscape, from a desire for forgotten nature. Go to meet her again, relive her. See the colors of the prism of water penetrated by the sun. This is where, as in Alberti's Renaissance ideal, Baptiste's windows open onto a world inaccessible at that time. New perspectives that point to a journey, a research.

The stimulus for this symbiosis is found in the story of the anthropologist, founder of structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss.

In 1935, Lévi-Strauss set out in search of an authentic, pure Brazil, endowed with wild energy and a unique nature. What motivates him is a crisis: the author of "Tristes Tópicos", moved by a feeling of freedom, throws himself into the sea for 19 days. He describes with meticulous beauty the sunset, the Brazilian coast, the bustle of surrealist André Breton. He ventures into Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, but is not surprised. In the music “Estrangeiro”, Caetano Veloso recalls that Paul Gauguin, unlike the anthropologist, was enchanted by the winding bay. Already in Sao Paulo, where he is invited to teach at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), Levi-Strauss is shocked by the dynamics of the city. Growing rapidly, it was the size of its country and there were no more indigenous populations.

Lévi-Strauss, accompanied by Mário de Andrade and his wife Dinah Dreyfus, enters the deep country, with ethnographic research on indigenous communities. The anthropologist, although he indicated with precision and affection why he saw, had a partially fulfilled expectation of the trip. His anguish is presented in a fragment of text with the features of prophecy: "In a few hundred years, in this same place, another traveler, as desperate as me, will mourn the disappearance of what I could have seen and which escaped. Victim of a double infirmity, everything I see hurts me, and I reproach myself relentlessly for not looking enough. »

To use the traveler as the meaning of drawing an imaginary line in time. A path. A movement. To cross and to be crossed by the path, by the meeting. The trip is also paid for with the body. There are bodies that are thrown into the sea without knowing whether they will return. Migration reveals a less adventurous aspect and more sacrifice for a right to life. Baptiste, in his trajectory, symbolizes the traveler who struggles, in precarious conditions, to find a place. In this sense, that nature, the subject or the artist, shift their gaze towards a denunciation of the eminence of disappearance.

Baptist's (en) tropics, like a traveler, make a journey to find a place where the artist rediscovers his vitalism. Maybe these species don't exist, maybe these idyllic landscapes never existed. But the window that Baptiste opens lets escape the air that today we can no longer breathe. Baptiste offers us a utopia, he delivers to us through his gestures a proposal for a paradigm shift, a possible ecology. The word entropy for the Greeks had two meanings: evolution and transformation. For physicists, it is a measure of the disorder of the system. Identify the mess, transform it.