Laurent Proux

Born in 1980 in Versailles (France), he lives and works in Paris.

In the depths of a carnivalesque labyrinth, fragmented body parts pile up like remnants of a glorious past, caught in the disarticulate claws of an organic machine that's out of control. A pictorial remake of Frankenstein fed by industrial waste where organic and mechanical movements interlock, invert and oppose each other in a Chaplin-like funniness.

Laurent Proux collects bits of pictures of models from German magazines from the eighties. He creates collages with this material and then minutely reproduces them in paint. A given moment in which fashion accessories and social attributes (shoes, jewellery, watches) as well as skin, slightly faded but unscratched, find themselves fixed, intact. These broken bodies emanate fragility, confronted as they are by cold and heavy metallic arms that seem to put these scattered scraps back in order. This recomposition of the world answers a meticulous logic but also an expressive movement, perceptible in the big abstract lines that bind the tangled bodies and machines like drafts of air. The elements keep appearing disorderly in their material and temporal heterogeneity like after a car-crash.

Laurent Proux's painting is part of a desire to renew the question of realism. He articulates this notion, that comes from Courbet, with research on the representation of the body as a fragmentary whole. He confronts Realism and Muralism (Rivera, Siquieros), the descriptive and the photographic with Pop Art, graffiti, the burlesque and caricature (James Ensor, Jacques Tati, Werner Büttner, Kerry James Marshall, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw). Represented by Sémiose gallery, he partook in the group exhibition No Cover at Arti et Amicitiae (Amsterdam, 2016). His last solo exhibition Line-off Ceremony was in 2017.