BREAK (FEAST)
Lauren Coullard
15.09—12.11.2017
Organised by Silicon IVIalley
Silicon IVIalley
Prilly, Switzerland
https://siliconmalley.ch/Lauren-Coullard
Photographs: Frédéric Gabioud, Paul Nicoué (editing)
Lauren Coullard: The Lucky Stories
Sometimes we’re lucky, sometimes small unforeseen miracles happen in the sinuous course of life. One of these was my meeting with Lauren Coullard, and almost immediately afterwards with her art, at about the exact moment it was starting to get born. Shortly then a new miracle - these were sumptuous times : Lauren Coullard started to paint. Suddenly, on the table, as airdroped from an invisible country where these sort of serene fireworks had been nicely waiting to hatch, Lauren Coullard’s first paintings. Just like that.
If the world was paying more attention to what matters, it would have done the same thing as we did: watch, admire, silently applause, and whisper our admiration, carefully making sure that she was not hearing too much, to let her do what she does best: paint, without listening to anybody’s opinion, because the truth is that no one has anything to tell her about what she should or should not to do. After all, she's an artist.
The following months and years have been and keep being a long way of recurring delights, everytime appear the modest and zigzagging epiphanies of joy, color, and personal narrative patterns rising with more or less density depending on the periods: characters in nature, human activities, vegetations, a few horses, or brillantly talented portraits that deconstruct the human face to rebuild it with only what amuses or intrigues the painter, resulting in small wonders of relevance, humor, pictorial accuracy and vital energy. Or recently, abstract signs on splendid large size canvas, made of color, peace and joy, quick like scribbles, but with the perfection of color harmonies.
Because, in fact, the supposed antinomy between abstraction and figuration, as some oppose body and soul, besides being a tremendous reduction of the reality of painting, finds one more proof with Coullard that in the end, whether you recognize people or apples or cats in it, or you only see lines and tones, it is always, more or less, stories that are told or that fly around, with some more obvious and some more subtle. Which is why sometimes everything finds itself mixed up with everything, boundaries get blurred by the brush, we see something, and what is it? Well finally it is color, it’s movement, oil paint, a brush stroke: nothing more, and nothing less.
Stories, she has plenty, and today she’s telling us one more at Silicon: in BREAK(FEAST), we are, you are, in a cereal bowl! And following a daydreaming reference to eighteenth century’s porcelain bowls having decorative patterns painted on the inside, here comes a beautiful wall frieze with dragons, as seen from inside this very bowl. And then, because a daydream bounces on one another, arise the memories of Mexican cereal boxes: photos of the Mexican boxes are printed and then pasted on the French ones, these collages are painted, and voilà: cereal boxes in the big cereal bowl, paintings in the installation, or maybe just a large painting that is also a large cereal bowl. Daydream’s pool ball bounces again on an elegance phantasy about the nineteenth century, catches sight of Dorian Gray, and here it is: Wilde’s hero’s taking his breakfast, or has taken it earlier, or maybe he is just about to take it - anyway, look right here: embroidered with his initials, he kindly left us his napkin.
The little ballet is in place, it is up to us now to dance.
Jérémie Gransenne