It does not take an expert to diagnose a type of dyslexia in Laure Prouvost (Croix, 1978). The French artist reads the world in a personal and non-transferrable way, based on associations of thought different from those of the rest of mortals. She advocates the accidental beauty that arises from the most incongruous mixtures, from the poetic potential of misunderstandings, from the gap left by imperfect translations. That’s why she prefers to converse in an English that she calls “sloppy” and not in her native French: when she is exposed to this communicative tension, surprising things emerge from her left hemisphere. “My imperfect English gives me distance and freedom,” says Prouvost about the starting point of his new exhibition in Madrid.
His artistic proposal transfers these ideas to the visual level. His acclaimed videos, which won him the Turner Prize against all odds in 2013 and then represented his country at the 2019 Venice Biennale – from which he left without a medal but has definitely become a central name in art today – beat impossible ones Combinations before : marriages “between tents and rabbits”, as it is called in their native language, or between churras and merinos, or between sewing machines and umbrellas.
Mixing speed with bacon is his thing. As with the squids that abound in his production, Prouvost thinks and feels at the same time through his imaginary tentacles with which he touches almost all artistic sticks. His approach to reality is caustic and abstruse, but also clear and insightful, typical of surrealism or dadaism that someone would have been painstakingly updating. La Casa Encendida dedicates an exhibition to him that includes three of his videos, an installation and his first experiment with virtual reality. In the Depths of Heat Leaks is something of a miniature retrospective. It covers his entire career, from one of his first videos, It, Heat, Hit (2010), a collage of disjointed images and text he completed while still a student at Goldsmiths, to his most recent work, Four For See Beauties (2022 ), co-produced by Kiasma, the Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Madrid Center. The merit is considerable: there are not many Spanish institutions, if not almost none, that fund the creation of new pieces by a European artist of the highest rank such as Prouvost.
The video “Four For See Beauties” (2022) by Laure Prouvost at La Casa Encendida in Madrid. The Burning House/Galerna
Not everything is perfect in this exhibition, whose scenery is dominated by a somewhat unnecessary tunnel of plants, and also due to the small size of the rooms in La Casa Encendida, which prevent a broader approach to a work as rich and varied as this. which combines video with installation and usually requires huge screens and loose dimensions. Nevertheless, temporal ellipses do not go badly in a work as uncartesian as Prouvost’s, and the selection is, after all, representative of the whole. In the second room, the installation End Her Is Story (2016) is an object theater inspired by his dialogues with artist John Latham, in which pieces of fruit, false teeth, old scourers and used teabags act as characters in an absurd melodrama full of autobiographical allusions to his formative years in London.
In the extraordinary work A Way to Leak, Lick, Leek (2016), commissioned by the Fahrenheit arts center in Los Angeles, Prouvost proposes an immersion in the American city, where “nature and oil, the rural and the urban , the elegant and the shabby”. It is the collective portrait of a group of young people fantasizing about escaping into a parallel reality, and from today’s perspective it feels like a dress rehearsal for his acclaimed Venice Biennale installation, Deep See Blue Surrounding You (2019), the chronicle of a road trip through French geography, along with various musicians and dancers, immersed in a festive flight forward It could be the leitmotif of a work based on the magical thinking of children and the insane afterwards seeks to “rekindle joy” in our tormented relationship with the world.Prouvost completes his videos with found objects, as in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Mirror Game seems to have jumped from the other side of the screen, only in an (even more) smoked version.
His first works criticized the saturation of images with a snobbish detachment. The last speak of melting seas
After a pleasant but harmless virtual reality experience, Surrounding You (2022), which Prouvost assures was shot “in a Belgian desert” – fiction is inseparable from its practice – comes the show’s narrative climax. His new video “Four For See Beauties” presents an alternative genesis in which one manages to return to the womb. It puts forward the poetic hypothesis of starting over. And to do everything a little better than in the first attempt, as individuals and as people (or “creatures of water”, as the artist prefers to say). In an intrauterine red-hued room, the artist films her daughter Esmé Blue (a baby name that only seems to be up there with Prouvost and Beyoncé) in a Finnish sauna where octopuses are once again plentiful. . Born just a few months ago, the girl also stars in a series of paintings that Prouvost is exhibiting at Madrid’s Carlier Gebauer gallery until the end of the month, along with the Murano glass sea sculptures he has already taken to Venice.
Comparing works from more than a decade ago with those from the day before yesterday can lead to error. The medium is similar, but not always its content. Her first videos alluded to the unrestrained consumption of images and the concomitant saturation of meaning, a very 2010s theme that she formulated with ironic and slightly snobbish detachment. The latter have shed this superficial shell: they speak to us superficially, with a sense of urgency, about a world where the seas are melting and our identity is merging with them. And in which no one knows where the idea of a common horizon ended up, although that was perhaps also a fiction, perhaps the most sophisticated of all. We never quite understood that old Broodthaers phrase: “I don’t believe in art forms, I believe in phenomena”. When suddenly Laure Prouvost appeared.
‘In the depths the heat escapes’. Laura Prouvost. The burning house. Madrid. Until January 8, 2023.
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