From September 2022 through July 2023, Laurent Proux was in residence at the Casa de Velázquez, Académie de France in Madrid. As the art critic Anne Bonnin concludes: “the Madrid climate is obviously no stranger to the sunburned element that has given a new twist to the painter’s most recent, light-flooded canvases.” This volume of Corpus Painting captures the artist’s prolific creative output during his stay in Madrid, featuring paintings from some of his most spectacular series, most notably Under the Tree and Têtes.

In his painting and drawing, Laurent Proux produces powerful and original imagery that seeks through his formal choices to resolve the questions raised by his subjects. Described by some as a realist due to the subjects he depicts—industrial machinery, workstations, sexualized bodies, etc.­—his style finds its emancipation through his never-ending exploration of pictorial solutions, the integration of aberrations, bringing planes into collision, the use of artificial colors, all freeing his oeuvre from the opposition between figuration and abstraction. He approaches the human form through fragments, exaggeration and the use of silhouettes to create a kind of body-cum-machine, politicized and under assault, often disturbing and occasionally sentimental. His canvases take the form of a stage, in an altered perspective and the artist addresses the spectator with a visual and intellectual enigma running through the image.