Often, with Laurent Proux’s painted bodies, we are not quite sure who owns which limb; there is an overall delightful confusion or a sort of organic pooling. The bodies made available come together and hybridise. Plugging in on each other, connecting their emotions via a caress or an embrace, they escape conventional desire-induced projections. Something from the Mannerist legacy runs through these pictures, namely in these particularly extravagant melees of bodies reminiscent, for example, of Bronzino’s in An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (c. 1545, National Gallery, London).

“I believe that man dreams only so as not to stop seeing”, wrote Goethe in Elective Affinities (1809). We wish we could have access to Laurent Proux’s painted figures’ dreams to see through their eyes. How do we know they are dreaming? They are absent from the natural world around them. If we pay attention, what surrounds them could not be identified as what we usually call, in the West, nature, which would be in opposition to the culture represented by these creatures adopting such non-ergonomic postures.
Paying thorough attention to the German Romantics’ thought, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy described dreams, in the collection The Fall of Sleep (2007), as the culmination of the individual’s absorption in something other than him-/herself: the body, finally free, lets itself go, and rather than oppose the world, it becomes the world. Perhaps it is this becoming that we are witnessing, as we are hypnotised in front of these Laurent Proux canvases where figures do not appear amidst grasses or at the foot of a tree: they combine, belong to each other, redouble their artifice by contagion, they express themselves, as it were, into each other.

These characters are dreaming up a world that is far less innocent than the nudes in full light by the bent tree, or those that we saw in the retrospective L’Arbre et la Machine at the Musée de l’Abbaye in Saint-Claude (8 February – 28 September 2025). We can no longer believe in their complete casualness. Time no longer stands still. The geometry has become complex, orchestrating a great battle à la Uccello where everywhere undergrowth branches clash and crack. As for the bodies, they use up the as yet empty space. Something has just happened: something is slipping, the intertwined group. Imminence is becoming paint. And Laurent Proux puts us, the viewers, in front of this undecidable world fragment, fascinating in its details of multiple crevices, creating for us, near the lovers, a lit-up path. It is up to us to see the escape.