LAURE BOULAY

“One day words no longer sufficed; they didn’t have the flexibility to express the complexity of emotions, trapping their meaning in a straitjacket of letters.” This is how Laure explains her (re)-birth into art and sculpture. Laure’s phrase aimed straight at my heart and soul. As a novelist, I live by words, I assemble them, bend them, and I sometimes almost surrender exhausted by their defiance, only to tighten the embrace that unites them to me. I understand Laure deeply, and her work triggers in me a profound emotion because it defies us to face our condition, our limits, and our capitulation.

Look at the strength of Brave New World. Hundreds of silhouettes turning their back on us, inclined and aligned one next to the other but never touching, identical in spite of themselves, tidy in their drawers, going down into darkness without questioning.

Lui expresses in a close-up the same feeling: an empty square head, wired and rusty. A hollow head but yet too heavy for its delicate neck, the fragile link between thought and suffocating flesh. The upper body is tied with a large rope in a melancholic and absent demeanor.

By revealing the chains that imprison our bodies and thought, the artist helps us liberate ourselves. She gives us back our freedom to be. Elle, the woman whose body and face are closed by a zipper, waits in
silence for the one who will know how to unzip her to restore her to herself.

The everlasting Glissade expresses our attempt to cling onto something tangible, palpable, in an uncontrollable drift. One is also struck on this artistic walk by these long bodies stretched until their near disappearance and at the mercy of being swept away by the vagaries of destiny, but whose roots draw from the soil and the earth, the certainty of their existence.

“A man’s love gave confidence to my hands” says Laure Boulay. In La Torsade, she incarnates this wild impulse, this inextinguishable thirst which brings lovers closer together to give their loneliness the comforting illusion of sharing.

Notice these oversized and gripping hands, reaching out in the hope of a contact or an encounter. These silent hands hang discouraged, or bravely decide to create and sculpt: the artist’s hands. These hands saved her.

Laure Boulay’s work points with uncanny power to contemporary solitude. In this world relentlessly boasting of personal fulfillment, the individual is formatted, constrained, and subjected to so many injunctions that he loses all substance. Laure forces us to confront the fears that imprison us to better free ourselves from them.