Contemporary Abstract Artist

Laurence Soignon was born in 1961 in Albertville in France. She lives in Saint Just de Claix in the Isère.

A self-taught artist, Laurence discovered her love of painting in 1987 as an extension of her interest in music and piano. Following 11 years studying music at the Conservatoire of Romans sur Isère, she left to pursue her academic studies in Grenoble, where she compensated for the absence of a piano by taking up painting - substituting music stand for easel, chords for colours.

She began in figurative art, producing oil paintings on canvas, and deliberately avoided tuition, so allowing her personal artistic expression to develop freely.

Since 2006, Laurence has been inspired by a passion for creative, instinctive art, reflected in her intuitive, abstract work that comes straight from the heart. Today, she works with acrylic paints on canvas.

Painting and meditation – Laurence finds meditation helps to bring her creative ideas to life.

Giving herself space to relate directly with the canvas, Laurence closes off all emotion and thought, directing her consciousness to her heart and allowing the magic of internal discovery to take over. It’s at this point that the painting begins to take shape. A surge of energy expresses itself through colour, lighting up the canvas and guiding the paint-brush to produce a painting that fascinates, enchants and touches the heart.

Laurence’s paintings are representations of her internal universe which, she says, in turn reflect the external universe given that everything is inter-connected and fractal. This is why she calls her artistic movement “Universfield Painting”.

She can, at will, bring the essence of a being or a soul surging on to the canvas, capturing the entity’s feelings and the emotions it evokes in us.

Laurence’s work has gained recognition through her many prize-winning national and international exhibitions.

Les Editions du Musées et de la Culture EDMC (Museum and Culture Publishers), and

La Promotion du patrimoine culturel européen (Supporters of European Cultural Heritage)

are honoured to introduce Laurence Soignon

The artist Laurence Soignon bridges the gap between the 20th and 21st centuries: her painting unifies art with science, declaring the artistic aesthetic for decades to come. Her work connects to the universal.

Anthony Antolini Editions EDMC

Artist Laurence Soigon is part of the artistic generation who, in the 1980s and 1990s, lived through a period during which society developed a renewed curiosity for the sciences. She began working in contemporary art at the end of the 1980s, a decade that saw rapid development in all domains. Caught up in an awareness brought about by the rise of new technologies, every one of us could see this progress was spreading fast, gradually invading our daily lives and environment. From computing to optoelectronics, from robotics to high-tech industries, it seemed there was no limit to human engineering. Space, the universe, cosmos surveys, NASA and European space programmes, plus the CNES years (French national centre of space studies) which opened up new paths in the progress of mankind thanks to French astronauts Jean-Loup Chrétien and Patrick Baudry. All this created new prospects for the future. Already, in Europe, in the industrial sector, we glimpse a future that will be inextricably linked going forward with the exploration of the planets, with cosmological advances and the fundamentals of science. It was amid all this excitement, that Laurence Soignon started, in 1987, what she calls her career as a painter.

At this time, these new scientific and technological horizons were having an impact on more than just the world of science, injecting new life into the world of literature and culture, as evidenced in the cinema with 90s films such as The Abyss and Back to the Future. Science trickled into every possibility and Laurence Soignon, likewise through her painting, started to create new images and develop a new aesthetic. Thus her work carries the imprint of the enormous advances made at the end of the 20^th century. Her painting ‘Technologie’ (acrylic on 50x60cm canvas) reminds us of this. She happened, by chance, to find herself straddling the culture of two centuries and has succeeded, through her paintings and innovative artistic approach, in leading the art world impressively into the early years of this new millennium.

In her painting ‘L’Inconnu, (The Unknown, acrylic on 70x50cm canvas), we can see the primary logic behind her approach: an excellent philosophical work, this painting suggests a generic design of the world based on a hidden understanding of the absolute that has still to be discovered by science. ‘L’Inconnu’ cuts man back down to size, confronting a natural world that is vast, unfathomable, magnificent and mysterious. The painting does, however, suggest there is hope for an eventual understanding, a possible comprehension of our universe that can be conquered by science. The artist makes this allusion by a dazzling, bursting, light in the distance painted at the top of the canvas – a hope, an objective for man and for mankind. Her pioneering abstract style uses illustrative representation to question the limits of exact science in the face of this universe. Such an artistic approach demonstrates an interpretation of cosmology through the inner feelings of the painter in a studied, proficient manner. The painting is an intuitive expression of reason. Reason must go beyond scientific findings. This work wants to play a part in decoding the unknown.

Her style is quite different from an ‘Action Painting’ which is set apart from its environment, as seen sometimes in the work of the exceptional artist Pollock. With Laurence, we sense abstract motion charged with human meaning - sometimes intuitive, sometimes intentional - seeking out the cosmic, searching for a positive universal. An emotion painted on the canvas, translated with a sensitivity that comes from internal meditation. A perception of Self in order to better sense the infinite. An act of painting which could be considered like an expression of the Asiatic concept of Qi (or Ki). The breath and life that the artist conveys here in her work diffuses a unique energy that envelops both painting and spectator. A richness of creativity that comes through in the clear, balanced beauty and majesty of colour; a grammar that becomes at times almost kinetic. Laurence creates a void inside herself so that she can transmit an abstract emotion to the canvas. She identifies both a part of herself and a part of these incommensurable physics, painting simultaneously. She withdraws into herself in order to reach the expressive external dimension of being. An ambivalence of concentration and spontaneity is found in her work.

(‘Plans Parallèles’, Parallel Planes, acrylic on 50x60cm canvas, ‘Emotion’, acrylic on 40x40cm canvas)

In Laurence’s fingers, the paintbrush moves freely, a link between her interior world and an external, galactic, sidereal world. The singularity of her artistic approach is that she has understood how to call on all her interior energy in order to communicate with the canvas. For Laurence, introspection and meditation prepare her for the physical act of painting and in this way she reproduces her deepest instincts with greater accuracy in her work. ‘Etat de conscience’ (State of Consciousness, acrylic on 80x80cm canvas) asserts the idea that a work of art can offer a mirror reflection of the artist’s sentience in the universe. For Laurence, consciousness is a space for emotion and open intelligence – it’s the means of ‘connecting’ with the universal. Her paintings have become veritable visual gateways between the state of being and infinity. For her, painting is an aesthetic vehicle for reaching an acceptance of our future through the passage of time, space and planetary cycles.

‘Destinée’ (Destiny, acrylic on 60x60cm canvas). In these early stages of the new millennium, Laurence is the first artist to found and establish the aesthetic of exobiology in art, with the inter-dependence of the force of the universe and the fragility of humankind and of life itself. ‘Suractivité’ (Hyperactivity, acrylic on 40x40cm canvas) confronts us with everything that eludes us while offering us an aesthetic idea of it that the picture anchors in our reality. These pictorial representations investigate new fields beyond anything we know in our present. We can see this unsettling apprehension in the painting ‘Mutation’ (acrylic on 40x40cm canvas). Its message clearly indicates this symbiosis between the material and immaterial, between being and the existing unknown. Laurence has extracted images from a perception of science, thus developing the painter’s mission in society as a sentinel of the future, to construct a collection of reference for science and mathematics when their theories can no longer reach these inaccessible physical-visual territories that can only be evoked (‘visualised’) through art, through painting…

‘Universfield Painting’ is the pictorial movement created by Laurence. Each of her paintings provides a very real insight, serving as the missing piece in the researcher’s or scientist’s complex jigsaw.

Her paintings propel and support science, helping science through art to reach towards the unchanging, generic, ultimate Eureka moment. In an interview with Editions des Musées et de la Culture EDMC, Laurence explains: ‘The aesthetic expression of my internal world is infinite and varied. My approach is first scientific, second spiritual, based on an interest in physical and quantum cosmology; classical physics, quantum physics and the search to bring the two together; equating a connected universe; a unification of the great infinity and the small infinity. This approach brought me to a knowledge of Self.’

In this way, Laurence establishes painting as a complementary method of investigation into the science of the universe within the framework of bilateral, transdisciplinary research between the Beaux-Arts and science. By working in tandem, the arts and the sciences will perhaps enable us one day, through the cross-overs and superimpositions of acquired knowledge, to uncover the secrets of the future. Laurence’s work contributes to this movement and is seen today, in Europe, as a stepping stone for the Beaux Arts into the scientific domain. She has founded a new aesthetic-scientific concept. Her paintings belong to the future already - all that remains is for society to make this type of contemporary creativity its own, not only for the current generation, but for generations to come.

Anthony Antolini, October 2015
EDITIONS EDMC

PAINTERS AWARDS ‘TALENT FROM THE ART WORLD TODAY’ 2015

Exhibition centre, Sud Côte-d’Azur]

Title: ‘The artist Laurence Soignon bridges the gap between the 20th and 21st centuries: her painting unifies art with science, declaring the artistic aesthetic for decades to come. Her work connects to the universal.’

© Editions des musées et de la culture EDMC 2015

Publication for internet and new media

www.artisticmuseography.com

This text may be reproduced freely, either in whole or in part, by any users - writers, students, journalists, galleries or for audio-visual use – as long as the following information is mentioned: title, author, sources, publication date.