LilyRobert
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Lauren Coullard
» Night Fall «
September 15 — October 30, 2019
Opening: September 14, 2019, 7:00 pm
Lauren Coullard's painting germinates and feeds itself into a systematic short circuit between abstraction and
figuration, mythology and fiction. Her works exhume a “d'antan” imagery, jovially neo-medieval, chivalrous and
religious, populated by dames, virgins and docile beasts — strictly courtly and mostly female. A pictorial reboot
with echoes from Neo Expressionism and Transavanguardia leads to incursions into metaphysical and symbolist
realms. The artist imposes confidently and proudly an anachronistic transfiguration of the present. It is more than
a carnival parade, or any sort of nostalgic tribute, almost as if she were seeking to redeem the contemporary life
from its schizophrenic, harsh and inconclusive narrations. Oneiric, epic, archaic and almost pagan, the characters
of her works seem stuck to a world with an evanescent gravity, a theatrical set romantically adorned. They rise
from the artist's unstoppable desire to snatch light from the darkness of the canvas.
In Night Fall, her first solo show at Lily Robert, Lauren Coullard triggers a further temporal switch, moving the
cursor over a science-fictional galaxy. Her lineup of ancestral figures is staged here to officiate and derail Isaac
Asimov's novella from which the exhibition derives its name. It narrates the coming of darkness on a planet
perpetually illuminated by sunlight—more precisely, by six simultaneous suns. Its inhabitants are terrified by the
advent of the night and its obscurity and the prophecy of an imminent total eclipse by a religious sect throws them
into blind desperation. Recovering the philosophical tradition of Enlightenment and the conscious use of the
rationality against every obscurantist drift of power, the story is structured around the metaphor of the relationship
between light and darkness.
Text by Fabio Santacroce
• • •
Lauren Coullard graduated from the Fine Art Masters Degree at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in
London. She recently exhibited at Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, Paris. Other notable exhibitions
of her works include Art Vilnius, Belle Air in Essen, Germany, Center For Recent Drawing, ICA, and Gallery 46
in London. Salon de Montrouge, Zoo Galerie, La Tôlerie, La Générale in France. Silicon Malley in Lausanne and
Peter Bergman Gallery in Stockholm.
She is also a co-founder of Paris artistic space and work residency DOC and her work was featured in important
French media such as Beaux-Arts Magazine, Libération or France Culture.
• • •
All works Courtesy of the artist and Lily Robert
Ph. Maurine Tric