Laurent Esquerré

Laurent Esquerré | Sculptor laurentesquerre.com

Your universe is infinitely populated. A universe populated by extraordinary, hybrid and elegant beings, whose roots are to be found in popular culture. (...) Your style is unmistakably baroque and spectacularly expressive. Everything in your art is surging and eruptive, romantic and heroic. For you, creation is not an empty word; it carries you, loud and clear. You're all about movement. Drawings, paintings and sculptures play the same tune and respond to each other. You're a baroque artist, but you're also an installer. Video can play a part in this thunder. Nothing about this seems paradoxical to you. When it comes to materials, you're neither exclusive nor hierarchical. Wood, earth, wax, chicken wire and aluminum foil all serve your purpose. The gesture is lively and unhurried. You treat the earth like a tailor. You remove matter more than you add it, with the stroke of a machete. Your chosen clay is very oily, plastic and malleable. You call it sculpting, notching, roughing up, pushing fresh, soft clay to its limits. Exhilaration and pleasure are the order of the day. You see sculpture in terms of size, and if possible in the form of a monoblock up to two or three meters high. (...) For you, color also has its own codes. Color and form are born of an identical necessity and are inseparable. You seek your nuances in the history of sculpture and painting. Never, however, is the clay soul completely covered by glaze. The beating of the red earth must remain perceptible. "Julie Marzat writes of you: "Powerful modeling, troubled beauty with a shiver of the terrible, sensual embraces... plunge us into the meshes of a new baroque", somewhere between the extravagant popular incandescence of a Fellini and a fantasy still to be redefined.

Stéphanie Le Follic-Hadida 
From the Idem catalog, Biennale de Châteauroux 2017)