Laurent Proux: I鈥檇 put you in a mirror
Reality may be inapprehensible. Formed by incalculable elements, it insists on not allowing itself to crystallize into a single concept, object, or mood; it avoids reductions. After all, reality is all of that and much more. It also encompasses the invisible, from cells to atoms, ghosts and spirits, depending on the eye of the beholder. But it also includes the unnamable, that is, those aspects that escape our reasoning capabilities. How do you call that which avoids apprehension? Therefore, trying to capture reality, it seems, is an undertaking doomed to fail. Yet hopelessness shouldn鈥檛 stop one from acting鈥攁s artists have demonstrated throughout history.
Laurent Proux creates what art history tends to call 鈥渇igurative painting.鈥� Paintings that attempt to represent what we see through colors, figures, perspective. They create a pictorial illusion, and we accept that illusion as being a vision of our world鈥攁n interpretation of reality. To that effect, several aspects testify to Proux鈥檚 figurative leaning. There are, for instance, recognizable characters in his canvases, and several of these people are performing their jobs, which lets us envision the space where this action unfolds. So, we have people moving around in places. It鈥檚 worth paying attention, in this respect, to the market dynamic at hand: little groups of mixed ethnic backgrounds working at a textile industry. Here, content and form unite in remarkable fashion.
Little represented in painting in general, work is fundamentally part of our world and, above all, the world that informs Proux鈥檚 paintings. So much that one of his most significant influences, precisely in Les ouvri猫res du Textile III, is the 1927 painting Textile Workers by the Russian painter Alexandre De茂neka (1899 鈥� 1969). As in this socialist realist work, Proux eliminates the fourth wall separating us from the workers, allowing us to examine their routines closely (women in barefoot, contained in both canvases, are also a clear reference). But there鈥檚 an essential difference between the two, as Proux points out: 鈥淢y representation of the factory is intended to be less utopian than that of De茂neka: the bodies have a more material dimension, more marked and more tired. However, I seek to put the human at the center of the painting, not the machine, a position that I find evident in De茂neka鈥檚 composition.鈥�
Recommended for you
Reality may be inapprehensible. Formed by incalculable elements, it insists on not allowing itself to crystallize into a single concept, object, or mood; it avoids reductions. After all, reality is all of that and much more. It also encompasses the invisible, from cells to atoms, ghosts and spirits, depending on the eye of the beholder. But it also includes the unnamable, that is, those aspects that escape our reasoning capabilities. How do you call that which avoids apprehension? Therefore, trying to capture reality, it seems, is an undertaking doomed to fail. Yet hopelessness shouldn鈥檛 stop one from acting鈥攁s artists have demonstrated throughout history.
Laurent Proux creates what art history tends to call 鈥渇igurative painting.鈥� Paintings that attempt to represent what we see through colors, figures, perspective. They create a pictorial illusion, and we accept that illusion as being a vision of our world鈥攁n interpretation of reality. To that effect, several aspects testify to Proux鈥檚 figurative leaning. There are, for instance, recognizable characters in his canvases, and several of these people are performing their jobs, which lets us envision the space where this action unfolds. So, we have people moving around in places. It鈥檚 worth paying attention, in this respect, to the market dynamic at hand: little groups of mixed ethnic backgrounds working at a textile industry. Here, content and form unite in remarkable fashion.
Little represented in painting in general, work is fundamentally part of our world and, above all, the world that informs Proux鈥檚 paintings. So much that one of his most significant influences, precisely in Les ouvri猫res du Textile III, is the 1927 painting Textile Workers by the Russian painter Alexandre De茂neka (1899 鈥� 1969). As in this socialist realist work, Proux eliminates the fourth wall separating us from the workers, allowing us to examine their routines closely (women in barefoot, contained in both canvases, are also a clear reference). But there鈥檚 an essential difference between the two, as Proux points out: 鈥淢y representation of the factory is intended to be less utopian than that of De茂neka: the bodies have a more material dimension, more marked and more tired. However, I seek to put the human at the center of the painting, not the machine, a position that I find evident in De茂neka鈥檚 composition.鈥�
Artists on show
Contact details
What's on nearby
