Sans titre, Exit serie, 2018

Baptiste Laurent   Emerging artists

“Exit”, the last project I am working with, is an exhibition whose start takes place in three exhibitions at the National Anthropological museum of Madrid, the Alliance française in Madrid, and the Gazzambo Gallery. Balanced between paintings and sculptures, the Exit series aims to make a pictorial and imaginary story of the exile's journey, the successive exile and even its possible success.

The sculptures were produced around a workshop of the anthropological museum in Madrid, with the help of Senegalese immigrants in Spain. Mame Mbaye (one of the participants of this workshop), street vendor, died of a heart attack when he was chased by the police in the streets of Madrid. This dramatic event provoked a popular revolt in the district of Lavapies. The Senegalese workshop of the museum and I, wanted to pay homage to him, and to immigrants who live same lifes.

Wanting to previously refer to the collection of plaster molds of indigenous faces exhibited in the anthropology museum, this is an opposition between portraits of the present immigrants, and inherited scientific sculptures from the colonial past. This confrontation is contrasted with the formal evocations of social scientist sculpture, traditional ceramic sculpture, the mortuary mask, the orientalist arts, or the trophy. The impact caused by this mixture of contradictory effects tries to reflect the paradoxes that Europe has with the reception reserved for refugees.

Without the rigor that characterizes the approach of the anthropologist or ethnologist scientist, but imitating its processes, my approach would like to provoke a new kind of view of the foreigner faces, intending to sketch a subjective sample of new human figures living in Europe.

The series of works under the title “Exit” includes a sculpture work and a painting work. Paintings made in 2018, try to evoke dreams of the traveller in the journey of exile. Sometimes considered as a tapestry pattern, sometimes as a window, and almost always on a square format, the series is composed of about thirty pieces, watercolour and acrylic on canvas and paper, by a medium size of 110x110 cm.