ARTIST'S STATEMENT

The concept of the dissociation of the body and the spiritual being is the central theme of her work. She explores the impact these dual forces have at different stages of life: the difficulty of becoming a woman, the onset of age, the passage from life to death. The bodies she creates are feminine; however, they are not presented as objects of beauty or desire but rather as disruptive images, shockingly unattractive. Sexuality is experienced as a form of alienation, minimizing their individuality and, indeed, their very existence. The being is subjected to this state, and if it refuses to live in this sexualized vessel constrained by weakness and disillusionment, it finds that it cannot escape. It becomes solely an object of all-powerful masculine desire. “Dolly chйrie”, “Sweety”, and “Lovely” depict bodies as objects which are rendered repulsive by their passivity. The eyes (or “l’oeil” in reference to Georges Bataille) are, for the artist, key elements which bely the hollow powerlessness that hides behind overt sexuality. Mutilated, cracked glaringly open; to become a woman is an impossible betrayal. While her sculptures inspired by Butф are addressed to nonexistant gods, her paintings are essentially image stills of a body in motion that freezes and disintegrates at the same time, representing the futility of fighting one’s destruction. Laurence Le Constant experiments with texture, sticking together and superimposing to achieve dense, flesh-like textures. Colors drip and splash on the canvas in an instinctive manner to create a sense of urgency. Sources of inspiration in the work of Laurence Le Constant include “La Maladie de la Mort” by Marguerite Duras, “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov, “Le Deuxieme Sexe” by Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the work of Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois, Egon Schiele, Marcel Duchamp, Roger Ballen, Annie Leibovitz and Butф.