Laurent Dorchin | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

The expression “art brut” (outsider art) was invented by the French painter Jean Dubuffet to describe the creations of a collection of artists who had no prior education or artistic background. In response to the research and work undertaken in the 1920s by numerous doctors on the creations made by psychiatric patients, the French artist crystallises the figure of the isolated creator and celebrates a deconstructed and savage art. It is in keeping with this “non-standard” and “outside the box” production that the French artist Laurent Dorchin, a self-taught painter, positions himself, recommending a happy and spontaneous way of practising art. \n When he was 17 the young artist fell in love with the expressionist universe of French painter Ramon Grimalt who powerfully mixes eroticism and violence, pain and irony, aggressiveness and happiness. Laurent Dorchin’s fascination with impulsive gestures and the instinct for creation stems from this wild maelstrom. He works on wood and canvas and in his compositions he transposes the transience of his impulses. Joy, passion, drunkenness, these are the dominant energies that balance forms and colours – those that can be identified and belong to the visible world, those that are all the more full of imagery, products of the artist’s impulsive inspiration, the fruits of his intuitive and sensitive gestures which allow the sole function of the invention to manifest itself.\n “Art doesn't go to sleep in the beds that we make for it. It runs away as soon as you pronounce its name; what it likes is anonymity. Its best moments are when it forgets its own name” said Jean Dubuffet in 1960.