Laurent Proux (born 1980, Versailles) is a French contemporary painter whose work explores the dialogue between industry and nature, human labor and material poetry. Raised in Viroflay and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Proux creates textured, layered compositions that examine how humanity constructs, consumes, and coexists with its environment. His recent exhibition, “The Nature Poem,” presented at Galerie Semiose in Paris (2024), reflects on the oxymoronic relationship between human creation and the natural world.

From Industrial Roots to Early Themes

Laurent Proux’s family background in industry profoundly shaped his early vision. His father began as a factory worker in Chalon-sur-Saône before becoming a business owner, instilling in him a fascination with production, labor, and material transformation. These early experiences became the foundation of his first artistic investigations.

“My family was quite tied to industry—completely tied, really—because my father started out as a factory worker in Chalon-sur-Saône. Later he had his own company, so he was a boss at the end of his life. I started working around one of the themes that has run through my painting—the working and industrial world.”

Proux’s initial paintings often depicted factories and industrial interiors, stripped of people yet filled with traces of human presence. He sought to reveal “the reverse side of the set, the backstage of how things are made,” a realm “much less clean, much less sparkling” than the polished surface of consumer goods. For him, the factory is a place where matter precedes commodity—a space for honoring those who make, build, and transform.

Through these early explorations, Laurent Proux established his core artistic vocabulary: a fascination with the unseen, the process of fabrication, and the material truth behind appearances. His paintings are physical, textured, and layered, emphasizing the act of painting as a gesture of work, echoing the manual labor they often depict.

The Reversal: Nude Bodies and Natural Spaces

As his artistic journey evolved, Proux experienced a decisive shift in subject matter—a “reversal,” as he calls it—moving from depictions of factories to representations of nude bodies immersed in natural landscapes. This transition emerged from a desire to paint what his industrial subjects had excluded: the body and nature.

“I said to myself: it’s the bodies. Nude bodies are bodies that, a priori, carry no social signs. And if the factory is a mechanical jungle, a jungle of wires, cables, steel, and plastic, what I’m not representing is nature—the pastoral universe, the forest.”

This shift did not signify a rupture but a continuation—an exploration of what lies at the other pole of human existence. The earlier mechanical spaces gave way to Edenic, dreamlike environments, where figures exist beyond social codes, surrounded by organic elements and diffuse light.

By moving from the industrial to the natural, Laurent Proux opened a new field of tension between civilization and instinct, technology and sensuality. His nature scenes retain a structural discipline reminiscent of machinery, yet they pulse with freedom, color, and movement.

Training and Artistic Influences

A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Proux developed his early subjects centered on the working class and realism. His goal was to reveal the hidden aspects of reality—the unseen labor and raw materials that precede the finished product.

Before entering art school, his brother Xavier Proux introduced him to literature and visual culture. Paperback covers often illustrated by paintings were his first contact with art. Among his formative influences, Gustave Moreau holds a special place. A visit to the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris with his brother was, in his words, a revelation.

“I was completely entranced by his colors, his strange studio, and those half-collapsed paintings with almost formless bodies.”

Later, during a year at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Proux discovered Giorgio de Chirico through his professor Alain Bonfand, who introduced him to the metaphysical dimension of painting. The sense of expectation and stillness in De Chirico’s works, particularly The Enigma of Time, profoundly marked him.

“I remember those images of De Chirico—the Enigma of Time—the reproductions of his paintings, that slightly metaphysical atmosphere, the waiting they create; they truly struck me.”

For Proux, De Chirico’s work embodies the tension between monumentality and fragility. He describes its illumination as “a faint theatrical light.” In his own practice, light becomes a director, an architect, and a choreographer, revealing rather than fixing the forms on canvas.

Light, Material, and the Lessons of Spain

Proux’s residency at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid deepened his engagement with light. The dramatic and apocalyptic luminosity of Spanish Baroque painting—seen in artists like Ribera and Zurbarán—inspired him to use light as a narrative force. He sought to create moments where light unsettles rather than comforts, where it reveals the instability of forms and evokes spiritual transformation.

He also cites the influence of Dominique Figarella, an abstract painter and teacher at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Figarella’s method—constructing paintings as assemblages of materials endowed with meaning—resonated with Proux’s interest in the “semiology of materials.”

“He often spoke of materials as crucibles. Like in industry—a crucible is something that holds history, something through which meaning passes.”

Another mentor, Yves Bélorgey, known for his paintings of rationalist architecture, encouraged Proux to analyze the texture and semiotic language of materials. Bélorgey’s exploration of modern urban construction echoed Proux’s fascination with the tangible and the structural.

A Turning Point: Chicago and the Human Figure

A pivotal trip to Chicago in 2019 introduced Proux to major African-American artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Jacob Lawrence, and Aaron Douglas, whose work grounded representation in social and historical context. This exposure led to a breakthrough moment of imagination: he envisioned three bodies on a couch before a tree, a scene that became his painting Intérieur South Side—a cornerstone in his rediscovery of the human form.

Laurent Proux also acknowledges Albrecht Altdorfer for his use of deformation and cosmic scope, and Gustave Courbet for his commitment to social realism and the portrayal of desire. Both remain enduring references in his practice.

“For me, Courbet is… it’s complex to explain because he’s many things. There’s the social dimension of his art that interests me—the art of the people—and, at the same time, his fascination with desire.”

The Fabrication of Reality in Painting

Proux conceives painting as a construction of reality, not its imitation. In his early works, photography served as documentation—a way to study texture, form, and process. His goal was never to reproduce the appearance of things but to find their pictorial equivalent.

“That is, not to reproduce the appearance of something but to find the gesture equivalent to that thing in painting—a pictorial gesture that expresses what the thing is, even when it is not representational.”

For example, in depicting chipboard, Proux does not paint each fragment. Instead, he applies brushstrokes that, by their rhythm, embody the energy of the material. Similarly, a blade of grass is conveyed not by shape but by movement—“the energy of the grass itself.”

In recent years, he has integrated collage techniques, assembling paper cutouts to form composite figures and scenes. These figures, often with distorted anatomies, suggest emotion rather than accuracy—sentimental or erotic architectures of the body.

“The Nature Poem”: Between Creation and the Natural World

The title of his 2024 exhibition, “The Nature Poem,” borrowed from a poem by Richard Brautigan, encapsulates Proux’s philosophical vision. The expression is an oxymoron: poem (from the Greek poema, meaning creation or fabrication) contrasts with nature, which exists independently of human intervention.

“It’s a perfect oxymoron, since poem, poema in ancient Greek, means fabrication, creation—poiesis—whereas nature is everything that exists without us, everything that doesn’t need to be made.”

The exhibition’s central painting, also titled The Nature Poem, is a large-format canvas that plays with unreal light, rich textures, and painterly gesture. Moss on a tree trunk transforms into “fish scales” or “bubble wrap,” turning the tree into “something animal.” Figures gather around a central void—a symbolic cave of mystery, embodying the unknown within nature.

The exhibition unfolds as a journey from twilight to revelation, moving from dusky, introspective scenes to lighter, more open compositions. In To the Night, figures inhabit a semi-aquatic landscape bathed in blue twilight, while the final painting portrays a serene Garden of Eden, complete with a small factory on the horizon—a reminder of humanity’s dual role as creator and destroyer.

Industry, Proux suggests, “is what allows us to inhabit nature—and what destroys it at the same time.”

Creation as Necessity

For Laurent Proux, art-making is inseparable from introspection—and from boredom.

“I think making art means accepting boredom. If you never get bored, there is no art.”

He sees boredom as the fertile ground where imagination takes root, away from distraction. The act of painting carries an emotional duality: the impatient desire to complete a work and the quiet melancholy that follows its completion.

Through this rhythm of construction, tension, and release, Laurent Proux redefines painting as both a physical craft and philosophical inquiry—a way of understanding the world through making. His art invites us to reflect on the processes of fabrication, the fragile coexistence of humanity and nature, and the enduring power of desire in artistic creation.