About Laurent Marty

    My artistic practice is developed around several questions related to the dialectic of the figure and the background, the work in reserve, the silhouette and the backlight, the organic, the concave / convex ambivalence, full / empty.

    My first ambition is to develop strange, singular, ambiguous images, having a strong graphic and chromatic presence, a real evocative power, but whose pictorial technique of ascent to the form would double this strangeness. Indeed, my paintings proceed from a reversal of the traditional construction procedure, and a questioning of the classic relationship between form and background.  It is a matter of creating a contradiction between the relief of the lower layer, which suggests a certain image, and the solid outline of the upper layer, which contradicts the expected silhouette, pierces the evoked volume, destabilizes the figuration.

    It's a very drawn painting.  I have a requirement for perfection of the line, even on a close scan of my large formats.  I am sometimes frightened by the exasperating precision I impose on myself in tracing the contours with the brush.  But I fear that the chromatic excess, the formal extravagances, I can only dare to do with this restraint of the hand.  To tell the truth, I would like the circumspection of my implementation to exacerbate the sensuality of the medium.