Laurente DELAMARRE
54 years old, was born in Valence, France.
Work et live in Paris.
Birth. Union with light-material
Fertile womb. It silently assembles the fibers that will make Laurente Delamarre's fabric of light. The womb is obscure. An antechamber to what will one day shine forth. Everything is counterbalanced in this approach directed yet intuitive. In embryo, this artist in the making barely sees the glimmer of the world.
They call to his eye to capture them, make them dance, and finally orchestrate them. Glowing red at the time, they don't yet get what they suspect from this future master of light.
Pain in the bedroom. Eye contractions. The diaphragm opens.
A prodigious burst of photons. The whiteness floods in, dominating, dazzling the consciousness and taking over the eyes. All is said without words, in this long single cry. At breakneck speed, Laurente appears, like a rebirth. In his hand, he holds his universal baggage from beyond time.
The light-fairy has chosen him. A marriage has taken place. Whatever the cost, it must be honored.
"Open&Close sex", 100 x 81 cm, Gouache painting on paper, 2004.
Adolescence. A ridge for a trajectory
Movement on the rock. Chasing steps. Graceful synchronisation. One leg stretches to reach a new support point Above all, don't tremble.
Look up and to the sides. Light everywhere, even in the cracks The mountain devours its men. It tolerates only the brave and the instinctive.
Those who give it everything. It is a mantis that reveals itself only to its greatest lovers. And only tolerates their
touches.
Laurente doesn't know it yet: mountaineering will be the reflection of his artistic life. At the top of the ridge, he sensed that tipping point was possible.
In a perilous balance, a precipice threatens both sides of his existence.
50 x 50 cm, "Self Portrait", PARIS, 2021.
Twenty years old. Revelatio lucis
Strait of Gibraltar. The maieutic light that lifts man from his bed and missions him in silence. Without a word
audible, like the Archangel to Mary.
Faced with the star, against all usage, sculpting more than revealing colours: Thou shalt do.
Like a birth of the self, everything will be shape, silhouette and shadow.
On this sea where solitude is the law, each of the elements hopes that the photographer will take it as a model and offer it chromatic immortality.
But Laurente Delamarre is only looking for the source of light. The sun will be the ferryman, because it is her only desire. Through
she makes herself known to him. From now on, she will be his medium.
65 x 92 cm, oil on canevas, 2001.
Thirty years old. Brush-light
Lost love. It must be saved or it will disappear. A woman has been there.
Go back to the root of yourself, quickly. Painting. That's all he can see. Immersion begins. It continues at all costs.
Then he presents this vital elaboration. The gallery owner: "You're missing the point.
Laurente needs tension to reveal himself. As in photography, where everything leads to its opposite, he likes the battle.
An elective friendship depends on it. In love without saying it. A life then. He struggles to find, so he finds backwards.
He is adulated and cursed. He discovers it by the hollow, in deductive circles. Then he touches the major tool: brush
light. Where form matters less than medium. He returned a few months later. The words change.
At he enters the world of art.
"Waking Dream, "Riviera light", 50x50 cm, Nice, 2024.
Forty years. The tool against the clock
Like those pharaonic dynasties when nothing is supposed to happen, this is a fertile decade.
These are the rays of light that continue to infuse in silence. It's not intellectual or reflective. It is not painting any more than it is drawing. On the surface there is nothing but incoherence. And yet...
It's a panoptic tool. Slow. Out of time. A mechanism that has become alien to its time. Yet it's there, in the present.
Not to oppose it. Not even to make an impression. But to achieve
Laurente's aim, whatever the cost. Shamelessly, in a time said to be past. It's a Rollei-Flex camera.
"Self-portrait", 40 x 40 cm, Paris, 2021.
Fifty years. We only talk about ourselves, and therefore about each other.
Imperfect, other people's time has run its course. Now we have to explore ourselves in the present. Make a trace of yourself.
Organic, with a finger smeared against the freshly printed image. Glittery varnish, discreetly coloured. This feather is
the interface between light-source and flesh model. Little by little, Laurente becomes his own tool. He will be the one
through whom the light distils its celestial words. It all goes back to childhood.
Deep down, the rays say almost nothing. But they do speak to him. Through his eyes. Ricochet off his skin. Return to the Rollei. The more fortunate hit the hyposensitive surface.
These are the chosen ones, here, before our eyes.
Laurente Delamarre has become a feather, a trace, a varnish. He is that other on the Sea of Gibraltar. He takes the place once occupied by the companion of life.
He begins this serious dialogue with the master light. He restores everything.
He retains nothing for his own use. He is only passing through. You don't capitalise on that. You only take what you
can take with you.
He makes a statement about his being. And therefore of ours. And to put it bluntly, he's exposing himself.
Monaco, 50 x 50 cm, 2025.
Today. Anthropomorphic light
Laurente addresses his guru, the light:
"Come, I'll paint you.
By instinct or by calculation. I'll reveal your anthropomorphism, your deity at Wherever I see you, I'll restore the human artefact that you reveal even better than I do.
In these scenes of the gods of the motor racing circuit, you will draw my faces. In this floral explosion, your neuronal portrait
that is mine. In these reflections of the city, my symbolic figures. I'll go so far as to tear away the veil that tries to differentiate us.
I will do my utmost to bear witness to the dazzle with which you inundate me."The light replies: "Make no mistake. Like a mantis, I will devour you.
I'm organising a drama for us in real time.
What I sculpt for you, I borrow from the matter of your mind.
To reach the salt of your soul, I prune more than I add .
You'll have to recycle yourself if you want to survive.
For I am above all the vector of your consciousness.
The revealer of your flashes.
Which are consumed as you use them. Renew yourself, that must remain your mantra. »
Waking Dream, "Place de Furstemberg", 50 x 50 cm, Paris, 2024.
Tomorrow
Icare dreams of reaching even higher. Already flying a few metres above the ground, to expose in depth the unknown that is the self. To paint the light is to draw ever closer to it and yet at the same time to distance oneself from it.
By survival, by necessity, with the imperative of avoiding the abyss. This wax that could melt...
All that must remain is the indisputable salt of oneself. Laurente Delamarre paints in these new, imposed lights. Resilient, he already draws on the beauty of LEDs, which, like sharpened brushes, enable him to chisel out his anthropomorphies, from an otherworldly sky and the roaring mechanical god.
He fleshes out his universe with these heroes, both close and frightening.
He is the bold painter who dips his brush directly into the pot of falsely indolent light.
Which, of course, will forgive him nothing.