De l'enfant et du mariage, Série Ibère Nation, 2014

Baptiste Laurent   Emerging artists

Ibere Nation Serie:

First obsession: filling the surface mechanically and cold with a basic work criterion. With a graphic element of the most elementary, a stroke with marker, from left to right, from top to bottom, until the lines cover the surface. The purpose is to fill everything, and the criterion is to do it in the least rigid way to reach a complete surface.

The process is carried out with the greatest application, starting from an intuitive line, by freehand. No matter how careful it is. it leaves room for failure. Repeating until filling the frame, and assuming errors, allows me to enter a mental state that is particularly empty, but concentrated, or in a state of true scratch.

Second obsession after a long and hard winter, between physical hibernation and intellectual boredom, what better for me than reading the speeches of Zarathustra down his mountain? Write them! The succession of letters and words without spaces turns out to be the most elementary graphic from to put in tune with my first obsession. Odd way to read Nietzsche writing it. Zarathustra’s speeches deserve to be read again and again as a parable told by the prophet.

Thus spoke Zarathustra is also a parody of religious texts. Animal metaphors and the solemn speech of Zarathustra do not seem easy to understand in a first reading. But what is clear is that Nietzsche tries to present to the world a new ethic. In front of a world in crisis or asleep where god has died, and propose to man a way out of what anesthetized state, the opportunity to overcome that void by becoming a superman.

For me it turned out to be a very interesting exercise, both in the form that serves as a vehicle and in the content of the message. Emerged from an empty moment, in a long winter, of a Spain crisis, I found it tempting to put this series on the title of Ibère Nation.