Laurent Good, peintre végétal

«Outre capturer le regard dans le dédale d’un geste minutieux, les œuvres de Laurent ont ceci de génial qu’elles trouvent leur pleine expression aux confis de deux époques opposées : l’ancestralité de leur technique et la contemporanéité de leurs formes.»

Cécile Strouk

Laurent Good, vegetal painter

Every genius has its piece of mystery. An unfathomable part, elusive, abscond. A secret garden from which he draws his inspiration, his creative impulses, his vital energy. What moves Laurent is his boundless fascination for the majesty of the trees, the fine vein of the flowers, the complex depth of the greens… or perhaps his anthropophobia, this social phobia of the other that makes him so anxious. In order to freely explore his fascination with Nature and to calm his overpowering anxieties, Laurent has created a world for himself. Or rather, a refuge, painting. He began his apprenticeship very young while living on the edge of the Landes de Gascogne, in Aquitaine, in a family keen on Art and very close to nature. He passed artistic competitions successfully, and quickly made recognised his unusual talent. Then, he forsaken for a time to try a « normal » life starting studies of Politics in Belgium. Normality that plunged him into a despair without substance, at 21. Encouraged by his close entourage, Laurent passed his exam to enter a major art school in Flanders, the Sint-Lukas School of Art. Two years during which he travels a lot, especially in Madrid where he rediscovers two artisanal techniques of the Middle Ages which are major in his artistic awakening. On one side, the Aubusson tapestry, large size hangings that have long embellished the walls of France and the Great Aquitaine (his region of origin) and whose centuries-old tradition has been inscribed since 2009 on the list of the UNESCO Cultural Heritage. On the other side, the mille-fleurs, pattern characterized by a background of a multitude of small plants and flowers, very popular in medieval art in Europe. However, he decides to leave this school prematurely in order to dedicate his life to painting. With this intimate conviction, the artist begins to paint every day, without stopping, for months, until finding his psychic balance and his artistic identity. Of these two major influences, Laurent inherits an incredible sense of detail and unalterable taste for the plant. He creates his first real artistic série : contemporary « mille-fleurs », hypnotics that reveal all the gestural power of his art. Beginning with a monochrome background or abstract shapes of human silhouettes, using natural pigments that he invents as he pleases. Then, he saturates this background with floral details, which maintain or crush the color. Laurent recognizes using heavily drawings by Pierre-Joseph Redouté – Belgian painter and engraver of the nineteenth century – to find the shapes of flowers and plants he draws. Finally, he allows himself, sometimes, to paint over his thousand flowers a long and serene final calligraphic movement. In addition to capturing the glance in the labyrinth of a meticulous gesture, Laurent‘s works are brilliant in that they find their full expression between two opposing eras : the ancestrality of their technique and the contemporaneity of their forms.