Emancipation 1 Artwork

Renold Laurent is a Haitian artist currently based in Boston. His dynamic and expressive paintings are rooted in imagined dialogue with his audience and between mixed media, cultural history, the present, and our collective future. His work is characterized by the duality of abstraction and representation, using geometric and natural forms, different textures, and a luminous palette. Laurent has collaborated with several cultural Haitian institutions, and his paintings have been exhibited in Haiti, France, and elsewhere. Most recently, in 2019, he received the Heimark Artist Residence Award from Brown University's Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice. Artist Statement Essentially, my subject matter is communication on various levels: whether it’s a dialogue between the materials and the media I choose to work with, an intra-dialogue among the various collections of my oeuvre, or a dialogue with the viewers of my oeuvre. The vehicle of dialogue allows me to put specific concepts such as “memory,” “resistance,” and “spirituality” in conversation with one another, thereby demonstrating how these concepts are not mutually exclusive—how they, in fact, depend on one another. I use different materials—both conventional and nonconventional. Depending on what domain I’m working in, I will privilege certain materials over others. For example, the most recent domain involves a specific technique in which I deploy mixed media—including, but not limited to, cloth, charcoal, resin, and sometimes even coffee grounds—in order to create a kind of recuperation. And by recuperation I mean how I ultimately reuse and transform these materials. In this kind of recuperation, I hope to convey how artistic imagination can compensate for the economic limitations many poor people have in acquiring or buying material objects in the first place. I try to respect and protect my local environment by reusing and recycling materials that are often discarded and within easy reach. I try to keep memories alive that way too.