It’s probably a midlife thing, but I’m having a growing appreciation for when things fall into their place. Back in Nov 2025, I visited Laurent Proux’s studio in Paris, just in time to check out the new works he’s been making for his current show with GNYP in Antwerp. And just as I was planning to kick off the week with a feature about the show, we announced our 2nd issue, for which I contributed an interview with Le Boss de la Peinture himself (among a few other texts). So, here is the intro of that conversation, as well as a little segment from the conversation speaking about the idea of making and presenting two distinctive bodies of work:
One of my favorite things about being an art aficionado is following an artist and watching their practice blossom, branch out, and become an even better version of what first drew you in. I have this realization almost every time I treat my peepers to new work by the French painter #LaurentProux. Whether encountering his paintings at fairs, seeing his exhibitions at Semiose, or, as this time, visiting his studio, there are always subtle tweaks that make the work feel sharper and more exciting. The paintings he was preparing for his solo with GNYP in Antwerp, even in their unfinished state, clearly displayed this ongoing development. The colors have grown stranger, the scale larger, the compositions more varied, and the overall ambience stronger, increasingly stretched between eerie unease and carefree leisure. All of this stems from Proux’s ongoing search for a painterly equivalent to lived experience, through which color values, gestures, and pictorial decisions become vehicles for translating reality onto the picture plane. A straight line haptically, and an absolute joyride cognitively.
"When I started the dreamlike paintings, it was because I found a lack of something in factory paintings,” Proux says. “A lack of love, lack of erotism, lack of humanity, but also lack of fun, and freedom. But when I'm only making the dreamlike paintings, it doesn’t feel political enough, not problematic enough. Maybe it's not realistic enough for me, and then I get bored, so I have to go back to the factory paintings. Because, for me, the factory works are the core. So, on one side it's a hand, and on the other, a robot, a machine, or a button. The more realistic paintings are about the buttons, and the more dreamlike paintings are about the hand."
Text by Saša Bogojev // Laurent Proux is featured in our Spring/Summer 2026 Issue 02, out now.
