Baptiste Laurent

BAPTISTE LAURENT (Nantes, France, 1980).
"De l'enfant et du mariage "", 2014.
Ink on paper.
Signed, dated and titled on the back.
Measurements: 140 x 110 cm.
In De l'enfant et du mariage, Baptiste Laurent articulates a work born of a double obsessive impulse that intertwines gesture, thought and vital context. On the one hand, the artist covers the entire surface with an insistent weft of elementary strokes made with a felt-tip pen, executed freehand and without corrections. The systematic repetition of the gesture, open to error and imperfection, leads to a state of almost meditative concentration, where the action is emptied of narrative intention to become a mental experience.
In parallel, the work incorporates the continuous writing, without pauses or spaces, of fragments of Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, transforming the philosophical text into visual matter. This compact writing dialogues with the accumulation of lines and activates a reflection on ethics, the transformation of the individual and the notion of overcoming in a world traversed by uncertainty. Conceived in a period of deep introspection, marked by a climate of personal and social crisis, the work fuses form and content in a dense and absorbing surface, where thought and gesture merge, and where the title De l'enfant et du mariage functions as a symbolic key that refers to transit, transformation and the tension between origin and social construction.
Baptiste Laurent is a visual artist based in Spain since 2007 and founder of the shared studio Latolier in the neighborhood of Usera (Madrid). He has exhibited in various national and international artistic and cultural institutions, such as the Palais de Tokyo, the National Museum of Anthropology or the Alliance Française. Self-taught, he combines his artistic practice with studies in political science and art history. He has worked as an art director and cultural manager in institutions of reference such as the Venice Biennale and the Galleria Continua. His work, mainly focused on painting, also extends to sculpture and projects with a strong literary, social and anthropological dimension, characterized by an anti-academic and eclectic approach that moves between neo-figuration, graphic art, urban art and abstraction.