De Coster Laurence

There are works that don't ask permission to exist. They impose themselves, raw and sincere, even before their author fully recognizes herself as an artist. These few paintings bring together a decade of creation, born one after another, each bearing the mark of a mute language searching for its expression.

A braided child turns her back to the world, motionless. It isn't a self-portrait, but it already tells us who the artist is. Further on, the dense oil of a body lying among scattered objects raises a question it doesn't resolve: what revolt are we looking at here? That of a body in decline, that of a world that rejects, or a more secret revolt, one that belongs to me alone? A watercolor that dissolves down to the bone likewise questions existence. A self-portrait meets the viewer's gaze head-on to affirm my place in the world.

An obvious truth emerges that I hadn't been aware of: the body is everywhere. Sometimes frontal and unapologetic. Sometimes hidden within dense foliage that swallows a barely perceptible presence, or in green water where two orange fish break the surface, because being is a space. The body never announces itself as subject: it seeps in, dissolves into abstraction without ever truly disappearing. It's th...

I'm Laurence De Coster, born May 14, 1988, and I've painted for as long as I can remember. Wednesday afternoons spent at my grandmother's, pencils and brushes in hand, nourished my curiosity for the visual arts, though at that young age I had no awareness yet of what was possible. Then, when I was 12, my uncle gave me my first easel, laying the groundwork for an early and sensitive relationship with color. My classmates already teased me about it: I always had to color everything in.

I formalized my practice during a year of evening classes at the Académie de Watermael-Boitsfort (2003–2004), alongside my general secondary education. Two large portraits caught my French teacher's attention and were displayed in the classroom. Then tragedy shook my life. I didn't return to painting until ten years later, from 2014 to 2016, with a clearer sense of the path that was mine.

A lack of confidence lingered, and to find legitimacy for my art, in September 2016 I passed the entrance exam for La Cambre, full of hope. But the realities of my life kept me from enrolling. A complicated period of my life kept me away from the canvas for a long time, though painting never left my thoughts, some of my writings speak to that. At 38, determined to f...