Laurent Le Bel-Roux
A Fax from the South

From September 11 to October 25

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present A Fax from the South, Laurent Le Bel-Roux’s newest series of paintings produced in Texas. In sedimented layers of acrylic, pastel, and paper, Le Bel-Roux paints scenes that shift and slide from icon to abstraction, and recognizable forms slip away with closer looking. Cave-like paintings ask us to look deeper into them to uncover a beginning, or the first layer of paint, but that origin is elusive. Le Bel-Roux asks us to reorient our search for meaning by enjoying the play of forms on the surface.

Sometime around the Aurignacian period, 40,000 years ago, humans reached a level of technological advancement that allowed us to successfully hunt and provided lasting protection from the elements. This was thanks to the development of transient but sturdy dwellings, knives, and robust flint tools that made it easier to hunt our favourite game: horse, ibex, and bison. These technical conditions coexisted with — and were perhaps generated by — the birth of symbolic thinking. Around this time, we also see the appearance of the earliest paintings and votive sculptures in Europe, discovered within the last few centuries in caves and beneath layers of sediment. 

What’s the connection between the development of our symbolic thinking and our technology? What help did painting give us on the hunt? This seems inscrutable today.  It is said that the earliest paintings are ‘pre-historical’ in the simple sense that they come before writing, but also because they act as a conjuring magic. Supposedly, early humans thought that these images actually did something rather than just depict it. They might have served as protective incantations, dedications to fertility, or as auspices for an expeditious hunt. But that magic isn’t some lost esoteric knowledge. The paintings oriented us to the world, and were just as useful as the technologies that aided survival. It’s no accident that horse was the prize game of the prehistoric human diet, and that we can find the animal depicted in the oldest cave paintings –  from 26,000 years ago at Pech Merle to 15,000 years ago at Lascaux. Paintings were a guide to navigating the harsh conditions outside the cave, an instruction manual for our tools and our world. Symbolic thinking gave us a leg up in interpreting and inhabiting the world, and in hunting horses.

That is where Laurent Le Bel-Roux’s show A Fax from the South places us. The paintings first appear like a book of Earth, cave paintings of prehistoric, sedimented knowledge. All that apparent magic is held in tension with our modern thinking, and our search to decode and understand images demystifies them. In Le Bel-Roux’s paintings, we initially want to read intelligible, recognizable forms, understanding the meaning or intention of the image. This is what we have been trained to do. But looking closer, anything tangible shifts and disappears. In the painting Marfa Lights, we stand at the mouth of a dark cave. We see a face in profile, and then in a kaleidoscopic turn it becomes a flame. In Furtive Monologue, an animal print slips into a Rorschach test, and back. We slide and wander over the painting, looking for a center, an origin, something we know.

One of the first joys of looking at Le Bel-Roux’s work is to dig back the layers, discovering the very first marks in the composition. We feel that there is something else deeper, more to be uncovered, a vein of history beneath the surface. But beware. Perhaps we ought not to think there is something to uncover. You feel you want to enter the cave, but why? Are you sure it even goes deeper? Le Bel-Roux’s paintings are a redemptive vision – what happens, happens right there on the surface. If these paintings conjure something for you, they have already reoriented your reality. We are spared from our downward spiral into the cave.

Text by Caleb Miller.