“Welcome to the Circus”
“Man can be a democrat; the artist splits in two and must remain an aristocrat.” Stéphane Mallarmé
This exhibition presents the latest artistic project by Baptiste Laurent (Nantes, 1980), who has lived in Spain for over fifteen years. It reveals the tragicomedy imposed upon us at the end of the celebration of the international order.
In the internal struggle of his creative process, he critically confronts his painting with hunting, war, and national identity, which here play the role of protagonists. Laurent revitalizes his painting by exploring his French roots, while drawing inspiration from Spanish painting and incorporating symbols of the Conquest, such as caravels, soldiers, and indigenous peoples.
Through the metaphors of the circus, the carousel, amusement parks, and football, the artist caricatures the society of the spectacle, 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 transformed cultural experience into an inescapable need for entertainment. It legitimizes the popular while simultaneously seeking a plastic and intellectual ideal capable of expressing the highest human emotions and feelings, resonating with the mythology of the dreamlike. Past, present, and future merge in the face of the frenetic unfolding of the tragedy of war and the colonial memory that surrounds the West.
By linking his work to his childhood, he reinvents the myths of the Wild West and the noble savage to construct a nameless drift, where masks impose a dramatic sense and dreams of glory are betrayed. Laurent resizes bodies, animals, and objects, imbuing his miniatures with a disproportionate and theatrical grandeur.
His boundless imagination, brimming with unsettling associations, is built around a virile imaginary in which he translates his individual past into a collective experience. The theatricality of his large canvases transports him into mystical and ghostly reveries, where he expresses his lyricism in harmony with his social concerns.
The artist blends dissonant elements, weaving connections between his personal world and the contemporary world through symbolic figuration, the versatility of artistic conventions, an agile, fluid, and unfinished brushstroke, the gestural quality of forms, the mixing of techniques (drawing, painting, and sculpture), the use of color reminiscent of the 14th-century Apocalypse Tapestry, humor, the grotesque, and the reappropriation of mythical paintings from art history, such as those by Vincent Van Gogh, Eugène Delacroix, and Gustave Moreau.
Baptiste Laurent paints as he pleases: it is a vital necessity. His painting transgresses the classical order of canonical representation, oscillating between melancholy and celebration, while simultaneously awakening the viewer's empathy.
Pablo Barrios Martínez, curator of the exhibition
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