Laurent Proux

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 Laurent Proux. 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. His paintings are a straight line haptically, and an absolute joyride cognitively.