A conversation with Laurent Proux and Zeynep Gülçur for Elephant Magazine.
What began as an interview quickly turned into a studio visit—and the studio visit into a full day with the French painter Laurent Proux. On a freezing Parisian morning, at minus four degrees, Laurent welcomed me into his studio, snow still clinging to the streets outside. We talked at length—some of it recorded, some of it destined to remain in memory. He told me Lenin once lived around the corner. Then the conversation drifted—from industrial labor to trance states, from the body to what his practice makes visible.
At lunch, over chili sin carne at a small local spot near his studio, I ate vegetarian; Laurent did not. He laughed—he wasn’t quite ready for that commitment yet. But commitment, in other forms, runs through his life and work.
Laurent had just returned from Martinique, an exception to his usual refusal to fly for environmental reasons. Time away from the studio, he admits, makes him uneasy. What if the urge to paint arrives with no materials at hand? That anxiety—between production and restraint, action and suspension—runs through his work.
Often described as a realist because of his subjects—industrial machinery, workspaces, bodies shaped by labor—Laurent Proux resists the label. His paintings unfold through fragmentation, exaggeration, and unexpected color, where bodies merge with machines and landscapes without ever fully settling into either. What emerges is not a fixed position between figuration and abstraction, but a constant testing of how painting can think: about labor, desire, violence, and tenderness. His canvases function like stages—spaces of tension and pause—where figures appear caught between action and rest, exposure and withdrawal, leaving the viewer suspended within the image.
Zeynep Gülçur: You recently exhibited in Paris at Semiose Gallery with The Nature Poem. The title feels deeply connected to your work. Can we start there?
Laurent Proux: To talk about The Nature Poem, I should probably start with the exhibition I did just before. It was called L’Arbre et la Machine—The Tree and the Machine.
I was engaging with a realist way of painting the working class. The exhibition took place in Jura, a French city where around 40 percent of people still work in big factories.
On one side, I was making very realistic paintings of factory workers. On the other, I wanted to paint something more allegorical, more dreamlike, about nature. What interested me was that this very industrial city is also located in the mountains, surrounded by large forests and hills. That’s why I gave the project this title The Tree and the Machine—even though, in the end, most of the paintings were actually about factories.
Zeynep Gülçur: And that’s when The Nature Poem became necessary?
Laurent Proux: When Semiose proposed that I do an exhibition in Paris, I felt the need to make the opposite of that show—to move away from the working body and the realistic depiction of factories. That’s how The Nature Poem came about.
The title comes from a poem by Richard Brautigan. It describes a nocturnal landscape, with strange things happening inside it. What really interested me was the contradiction within the title itself. “Poem” comes from the Greek poíēma, meaning “to do,” “to make,” “to create.”
Nature is exactly the opposite. We don’t create it; it existed long before us. It generates itself, without our intervention. It doesn’t explain itself—it simply exists.
Zeynep Gülçur: What did that contradiction allow you to do in your work?
Laurent Proux: This paradox was very important: trying to paint nature as a subject, even though this subject has nothing to do with you as an individual. It creates a tension between something that creates itself and something that you have to create as art. That tension was really the feeling of the exhibition.
In contrast to the exhibition in Jura, the bodies in The Nature Poem are relaxing, sleeping, or embracing—but they are no longer working. Since nature produces itself, the human figures become almost like flowers within it. In that sense, the work still speaks to questions of the working body and working-class imagery, but from the other side.
Zeynep Gülçur: Looking back at your 2018 exhibition Metallic Jungle, you showed cartoonish figures in industrial spaces, where organic and mechanical movements were closely linked. Would you say this was the start of your exploration of the relationship between the industrial and the organic?
Laurent Proux: Metallic Jungle was maybe the last exhibition—never say never—but still—where the body was really assembled onto the canvas as a collage.
This collage came from the beginning of my work. At first, I was painting factories with no human bodies inside. It was only the space, the factory itself. But of course, factories can only exist because people are working inside—maybe not with Elon Musk in the future [Laughing] —but normally they exist because of workers.
Zeynep Gülçur: This feels like a nervous laugh…
Laurent Proux: Well… It’s a space created to do something. All the tools are made for the hand, but they’re also dangerous for the body.
So even those factory paintings were already about the body of the worker—the human body inside an artificial space, a working space. Slowly, the body appeared as a fragment, as a necessity to say something about the space. There’s a sentence by Brecht—it’s hard to say it well in English—but it goes something like: “The best photograph of a factory tells nothing about the conditions inside the factory.”
Zeynep Gülçur: Did breaking the body into parts become a way of exposing what factory images usually hide?
Laurent Proux: You can make a beautiful photograph, or even a beautiful painting from a photograph, but you still don’t know what kind of place it is—whether it’s violent, whether the workers are protected, whether there’s a union or not.
The body fragments appeared as a way to speak about that hidden reality: the violence of the machine on the worker’s body. Fragmentation came from the idea of work injury—the body shaped by an aggressive environment.
Slowly, I started to connect these fragments, making figures like in Metallic Jungle—almost carnival-like, a bit grotesque, a bit playful.
Through the body, something else entered: eroticism, tenderness, sensibility. From there, I moved more and more toward full human forms.
I wanted to speak about what a factory image cannot say. That’s how these dreamlike, sensual paintings came out of the impossibility of sensibility inside a factory.
I often think of it like a glove. One side shows the outside—the traces of use. Turn it inside out, and you find the warmth of the hand. The Nature Poem—and these nature paintings—exist on that inside.
Zeynep Gülçur: The glove image makes me think about control—about something internal suddenly becoming visible. When you paint nature, what decisions are you making about separation and connection?
Laurent Proux: I would say it’s different in each painting—it’s always moving. It’s like being thrown into nature. There is separation, but it’s internal. They’re not completely involved in it, and that’s where the melancholy comes from.
At the same time, they are touching it. Light is very important. Sunlight goes through their bodies—sometimes it feels like it doesn’t just land on the skin, but passes through it. It’s more about nature penetrating them than them fully entering nature.
One of the first series I made after the factory paintings was Heads on the Grass. It was only heads. I imagined someone choosing to lie down, to look at the sky, with their head surrounded by grass—someone beginning to return to nature, maybe just for a minute. Maybe they’re waking up from a nap.
They are separate, but they’re trying to return. And maybe they don’t succeed [Laughing]. Exactly what we’re trying to do.
Zeynep Gülçur: That attempt to get closer without fully merging seems important in your work. Photography feels like another kind of mediation—maybe where control comes back in. You’ve spoken about photographing factories during your residency—what role does photography play in your practice, and how does it relate to painting?
Laurent Proux: It’s a big question. I still use photography for my paintings, but not to copy reality. Even when photography was more dominant in my process, I treated it like a list des courses. You know, like when you go to the supermarket and write down, “eggs, milk…”
Zeynep Gülçur: A shopping list?
Laurent Proux: Exactly! Photography is my memory tool, a reminder of details, because you forget everything after a minute.
The challenge isn’t reproducing the photograph. When you paint from a photograph, you often end up abstracting its surface. My idea was to find equivalent gestures in painting—ways of translating what I was seeing, without copying it directly.
Every material I reproduced had a different pictorial equivalent, a different way to act in the painting. Collage came from this too. If you try to produce every element in space, then you have a very heterogeneous painting. This strategy became the evolution of the work.
Today, the only time I really use photography is for factory spaces. I like the idea that the factory is a machine and the camera is a machine—it’s a machine facing another machine.
But to paint a tree, I don’t need a photograph. We understand a tree through the body—it’s another kind of body. A machine is not.
Zeynep Gülçur: The way you talk about painting sounds almost like an altered state. I’m curious—have you ever experimented with ayahuasca or plant medicine?
Laurent Proux: [Big laugh] No, I haven’t. I would like to! But I’m very old-fashioned. I always imagine doing it in a beautiful house, in the middle of a forest.
It’s a bit funny, but I’ll say it: painting has an ayahuasca effect for me. When you arrive at the studio in the morning, it’s cold, dirty, full of oil—you don’t even want to be there. But you work. You paint all day, and by the end, it’s like being in a trance.
You create as if in a dream—you make a gesture, and suddenly it becomes something alive. It’s like the birth of a world. Leaving the studio at the end of the day is always hard.
I remember working on the largest painting I’ve ever done. At the very end, I was painting water—stones under a river, fallen trees. To get the transparency right, I had to wait for the layers to dry completely. When I finally painted the water, I really felt a breeze, as if I’d turned on the AC.
Zeynep Gülçur: Like you became one with the water?
Laurent Proux: Exactly. It was physically transforming. That’s the trance I’m talking about.
Zeynep Gülçur: That sounds strangely beautiful — and not very old-fashioned at all. How do you enter a new phase in your work? What helps you shape it?
Laurent Proux: When I’m producing new work for an exhibition, it often starts with the space—the city, the architecture of the venue. Right now I’m working on an exhibition at GNYP Gallery in Antwerp. It’s a large old house from the beginning of the 20th century, with remaining Jugendstil, Art Nouveau details. Those details matter to me. I won’t say too much yet, because I’m still working on it, but that’s usually the starting point.
I always have my sketchbook with me. I don’t know why, but I love to work in the subway—maybe it’s my machine obsession, but I like to draw there.
Later, when I find a composition or a situation between figures, I make small cut-outs—like little puppets—to make the drawing more sculptural, more solid. Sometimes I start directly with collage, playing with the cut-outs and building a composition between figures.
Zeynep Gülçur: Your figures can be tender, awkward, sensual, funny — all at once. Do you think about gender as a fixed quality in them, or does it shift depending on how they’re interacting with the landscape and each other?
Laurent Proux: I want the body to appear as architecture, as contact, as folding. Bodies are a space, a vehicle to connect with the landscape.
Gender is not fixed. A hand could be feminine, the arm masculine, the trunk feminine, the head masculine. It’s more like a journey, a labyrinth inside the figures. They’re not without gender, but they’re above gender.
Maybe the painting itself is bisexual, and the viewer has a gender. Carl Einstein, the anarchist art historian, once described Cubism as bisexual, a form that moves between concave and convex space and resists fixed identities.
Zeynep Gülçur: I read that you’ve spoken about how art history often enters the creative process through association. Do certain artists surface in your practice?
Laurent Proux: I wouldn’t say surface but I’ve learned a lot about painting from Gustave Courbet. For me, realism is connected to him. But when you really look at his paintings, they’re not strictly realist—they’re more about the story of a body within its world.
Many of his figures feel isolated, almost like animals in their surroundings. Take La Source: you see the woman from behind, her body placed against a rocky wall from which water flows. You don’t see her face, so the figure could be anyone—including the viewer, entering the painting through that body. Of course, there’s also eroticism there, because it’s a woman’s body seen through a male gaze.
Zeynep Gülçur: I wonder whether you see your work as erotic?
Laurent Proux: Yes, but they’re also cannibalistic. In this nature, everything can eat everything. I remember talking with a friend while working on a large forest painting. He asked whether I would include animals, and I said, “the forest itself is the animal.”
It can be comic, and it can be tragic. It’s never just one or the other—it exists in that space in between.
Zeynep Gülçur: This conversation reminded me of the director Yorgos Lanthimos—his modern Greek tragedies, with tensions between fate and free will. Do you know his films? When I look at your paintings, they often feel driven by inevitability more than narrative.
Laurent Proux: No! Can you write me his name and tell me which film I should see? I’ll definitely watch it.
Zeynep Gülçur: Then let’s keep it open. I’m curious to hear what you think once you’ve seen them.
Laurent Proux: I told you about my trip over New Year’s, when I shut myself off from the world—no phone, no news. When I finally turned it back on, the first thing I saw was Trump’s attack on Venezuela. Trump considers politics to be like a porn film that never ends.
And suddenly I was thrown back into this very adult, already-known world.
That’s exactly why I try to return to the imagination you have as a child. You don’t really know perspective, you don’t construct reality yet, and one of the saddest things about being an adult is that you already know everything before really seeing it.
Even if the shapes in my paintings are a bit archetypal, I like to present them as if they’re new—as a fresh perception, the way a child sees the world as color and pattern rather than fixed space.
For me, the naïve is like birth itself— seeing reality as it actually is.
