Laurence PAPOUIN - Densité

Press release

Galerie Richard presents Density, Laurence Papouin’s second solo exhibition, from March 17 to April 21, 2018. In his first exhibition at the gallery in 2009, Laurence Papouin presented acrylic paintings suspended on a metal support fixed to the wall whose folds and folds contrasted with the geometric motifs as well as monochrome acrylic paintings that stood out at the same time domed and deflated. Laurence Papouin is an artist who constantly invents and seeks new ways of expression by manipulating paint material. The first artist in France to dare to make painting material independent of any classical support, his art today breaks the strict divisions between painting, bas-reliefs and sculpture. If sometimes his small works can have a minimal aspect, it is not necessary to be mistaken: since the artist has the possibility to realize large-scale works such as Accumulation of five paintings on bar, it is well in a enjoyment of baroque art, with its visual and conceptual complexity, the pleasure of being lost in the sinusities of folds and folds of the visual space, which she invites us with delight.

Laurence Papouin, like Linda Besemer, applied several layers of acrylic until once she had a heavy drape independent of any support. By freezing it and protecting it in the resin Laurence Papouin opens the way to a very wide field of experimentation of paintings in space. It plays on the ambiguity of the term painting which means both a material and the object painting.

Laurence Papouin knows how to stay in the picture in her series Peau sur peau, which reminds us that painting has intrinsically this material that offers the sensuality of a skin.
With the High Relief series, acrylic canvases pleated like a cloth on a round support that could refer to the visual space of the opening of a washing machine, except that this support seems lacquered by the varnishes, offers us a new standard of three-dimensional.
The series of pieces entitled Echo shows us a precedent passage between the mural work and the sculpture work, in a completely different way in appearance, more in the form of an introversion/extraversion duality.
Today Laurence Papouin also shows us a set of paintings in the form of sculptures whose material cut into a ribbon wraps and is tied like a curled-up newborn, who has not yet fully deployed in space.

The title of the exhibition Density proposed by the artist gives a good account of this moment of gestation, of passage between two dimensions, which takes place in long stages, crucial works in the creative journey of Laurence Papouin.

Laurence Papouin, born 1974 in Genevilliers, lives and works in Paris. In 2010 she exhibited at 19, CRAC de Montbéliard; in 2011 she was the 2011 laureate of the Prix Novembre in Vitry; in 2013 she exhibited in “Nouvelles Vagues” at the Palais de Tokyo and the Domaine de Kerguéhennec; in 2015 she exhibited at the Espace d’art contemporain Camille Lambert in Juvisy-sur-Orge; in 2017 she exhibited at Artbn gallery in Seoul and currently at Son gallery in Tongyeong, South Korea.