Exploring the world through ‘your projections’. But why?

Where does the world begin? By the frayed asphalt of the banlieue or by the azure blue ocean? With a gasping fish on dry land or the stratosphere above our heads where petals flutter in the wind? Or maybe it’s all just a bubble of a few square meters, where the light turns on and off, and that was it.

For some artists, their art is the world. And that art – just like thoughts – is limitless, multiform and associative. This certainly applies to the French artist Laure Prouvost (1978), an expert in the field of surrealist installations in which the viewer disappears and in which laws and natural forces no longer seem to apply. Her work – moving images, sound installations full of mumbling, music, the tapping of water drops, voluptuous sculptures of concrete, glass and other materials – is colorfully colored, imaginative, full of symbolism, light-footed, and all this with a touch of heaviness. Because under the beautiful surface, Prouvost scratches broad themes such as migration, the meaning of death and life, the reversal of time, environmental pollution, the meaning of the world and the role of language in it. Stress of choice is strange to Prouvost: she just does everything.

Why does Prouvost need so many bells and whistles?

I know Prouvost’s work from separate installations in which one such theme is depicted gracefully, loosely and dreamily. Last year in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, I was positively surprised by Prouvost’s reworking of words and meanings in a luminous universe of carpets, objects and sand. Here a mandarin meant ‘love’ and a bleating goat could very well be a chattering human. At the last edition of Sonsbeek she transformed a cellar of De Groen Collectie into a poetic underwater world where the praise was sung to the squid dreaming in colour.

Internationally rampant project

‘Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre’ is the title of the total installation branching out over half the museum wing that Prouvost has set up in Bonnefanten. This installation is a traveling project that continues to grow in every place. Started at the Venice Biennale in 2019, and now ‘washed up’ – to remain in Prouvost’s world of thought – on the banks of the Meuse. In Maastricht, the presentation from Venice is divided into two parts: with a beginning, then a lot of rooms where other work can be seen, and an end.

You enter a large hall where a ‘surf’ of resin and sand has been poured over the floor. Feel free to walk over it. Under your shoes it shines azure blue, creamy white and it looks magical, until you see the dead octopus, an old sneaker, a dirty mouth cap, leftover food, a pigeon with a cigarette in its beak, a clothes hanger, a broken Ipad. In this way, Prouvost shows contemporary beauty: as something that cannot be enjoyed naively and carelessly, but is accompanied by a mourning edge.

In Venice, this branding was the beautiful, almost meditative counterpart to the burlesque film They Parlaient Ideale† That film is the last in Maastricht: you have to ‘wade’ towards it at the end of the course in the dark through leaden curtains.

The decision to pull this work apart and fill the middle part with a great deal of other tentacled work by Prouvost – including those from the Bonnefanten collection – is dramaturgically unsuccessful. Room after room, the glass sculptures resembling table lamps string together: beautiful breasts emerge, trumpet-like shapes refer to wombs, mothers and multiplication. A glass shopper hangs from a grid next to used tea bags. There are fountains with gargoyles, withered plants, lights that flash on and off, and of course there is a lot of video, sound and text. We must gallop, the artist urges you. And we have to get to know the world ‘through our projections’. But why?

Eventually your tension breaks, and the buildup gets a bit random. What does the artist actually want to tell us in this course? Why does she need so many bells and whistles? Why all the loosely dropped puns? Are they just there for fun?

Prouvost’s work certainly has a seductive power. But at the end of ‘Deep Blue Surrounding You’ you look, in the movie They Parlaient Ideale, again to a course with much of the same. A carnival procession begins in a French banlieu. There is stillness. There is music. Young and old go hand in hand. Flowers are delayed in the picture. And then the group reaches the sea, the lagoon and canals of Venice. ‘Swimming’, as Prouvost likes it, you return through the curtains, room after room back to the beginning. You would like to stay afloat, but you are sinking.