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Strange and surprising, the exhibition of laure provost stands out on Madrid's autumn billboard. This is attested by the pilgrimage of young people who visit it every day. Although it does not correspond to the retrospective of a decade that is announced, and despite the unfavorable distribution of La Casa Encendida's spaces for large projects, this exhibition ends up recreating his fascinating poetics, which led him to a brilliant trajectory in the international artistic system.
Frenchwoman Laure Prouvost (Croix, 1978), graduated in the United Kingdom, from Saint Martins and Goldsmith College, after winning the Max Mara Prize for Women in 2011 and being the first foreigner to win the prestigious Turner Prize in 2013, he established himself in a large individual project at the Palais de Tokyo in 2018, which earned him the opportunity to represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2019.
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Later, exhibitions multiplied and, at this time, his work can be found in the best collections of contemporary art. However, she would like to be perceived as a foreigner, or an anti-system migrant: her poetics advocate a longed-for and utopian return to creativity against specialized artistic professionalism. Videomaker and visual artist, artisan and collector of natural and manufactured waste, her production is reflected in multisensory installations (environments) where narration, language, myth, singing, onomatopoeia and whispers are protagonists.
With the disarticulation of the videographic language and the visual regime in its entirety, the exhibition begins in rooms B and C of the mezzanine (another possible option would be to start the tour on the ground floor with recent pieces). The video That, Heat, Hit2010, is a sequence of juxtaposed everyday images, unrelated to the narrative in question. offand written sentences interspersed with which the aim is to interact with viewers, not without humor.
In his opinion, words and images “must be deconstructed, and reconstructed, modeled and remodeled”, in comparison with the society of advertisements, propaganda and slogans in which we live. Certainly the viewer creates understanding or builds different associations if he sees this 7-minute tape more than once, which somehow evokes and responds to the film The society of the spectacle (1973), by Guy Debord.
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Prouvost developed a brilliant career in the art system
In the opposite room was installed Finish her story2017. Immersed in darkness, we watch the instantaneous and fleeting illumination of the objects on the bases, synchronized with the intimate, dramatized narration, with the intention of leading us to a mental space, like a cathartic therapy, of cleansing and sensory opening, which will serve us when let's go down to the ground floor.
There we found a narrow arch like passage built with dry branches and reeds: around you2022. The tunnel is a recurring idea in Prouvostused it in the mythical narration of the loss of his grandfather, a supposed minimalist artist, in a “conceptual tunnel” in his project Grandpa's Visitor Centerpresented at the Milanese Pirelli HangarBiccoca, in 2016. Here it works as a suggestion of a labyrinth and initiation transfer.
[Damián Ortega, explore the vision]
He too environment A way to leak, lick, leek2016, with his video project road movie of some young people in California and the contrast between the warm dreams and the damp, melancholic and cold ground, recalls the large installation and video of a group's trip through French regions that would later be set up, at the French Pavilion in the 2019 Biennale edition.
Without a doubt, the greatest piece of this exhibition is the video From the Depth2022, 15'14”, whose installation suggests a Finnish sauna, which is also used as a paritorium and which the androgynous Laure Prouvost has carried out with her three-month-old baby as the protagonist, together with a trio of women, and her outstanding presence of images of pulps and squids, recurring elements in his work (also in the works that have been little seen in the carlier gebauer gallery in Madrid): “holding the brain in its tentacles, representing the psychic and animal connection that was lost” .
A humid and warm environment, where we want to erase the separation between human beings and nature. enjoymentjoie de vivre, fluidity, shared sensuality, post-human rebirth.
As he himself stated, years ago Prouvost asked himself the old question, typical of the 1960s – explicitly posed for the first time by Eva Hesse In yours daily– about whether she could be an artist and a woman. This is his joyful response, in a post-human horizon traced utopically in the stories of Donna Haraway in stay with the problem, with the metamorphosis of human and animal in search of survival. But believe me, there are artists like Prouvost who do not illustrate theories. The belief that it is possible to think by feeling is the axis of his work. As is repeated in this video, it is capable of “taking us to dream in places we never imagined”.