This Sign Dreams of Breaking Front Tears
2022
Materials: Oil on panel
Collection: Collection M HKA/ Flemish Community (Inv. no. BK009584).
Laure Prouvost (°1978) is best known for her immersive installations which she assembles using different techniques, media and found objects. As in her idiosyncratic films and paintings, she emplloys these alienating settings to question the relationship between fiction and reality. She connects mental processes like dreaming, remembering and imagining with psychoanalytic, philosophical and artistic references. Her oeuvre is peppered with reflections on the complex workings of language.
This Sign Dreams of Breaking Front Tears (2022) is part of an ongoing series of paintings where she displays statements and reflective phrases in white capital letters on a black background. By naming the intention of the sign (‘this sign dreams of...’), Prouvost punctures the obviousness of language in society. With ‘front tears’, she in turn refers to the miscommunication that nestles in the spaces between written and spoken language: contextually, after all, ‘frontiers’ fits the sentence better.
© Tekst: Anneleen van Kuyck