Laurent Durrey

Laurent Durrey works with posters. He travels the world — France, Belgium, Germany, England, the United States — in search of posters pasted on walls, which he removes, fragments and tears before mounting them on canvas. He describes himself as a "new realist creating from what already exists" and, by his own account, continues the research of the affichistes of the 1950s and 60s; Galerie Calderone presents him as "the natural heir of the affichiste artists of the 1950s and 60s". The face, the only frankly figurative element, anchors the composition. With these fragments and tears of paper, he makes subjects from the public domain intimate and brings them into the domestic space. His paintings work like a travel journal: a poster from the Paris metro may sit alongside papers brought back from Italy or Brussels. A first series draws on his childhood memories — cinema, The Godfather, Gainsbourg, Bowie; a second renounces personal memory and composes from unknown posters, in order to "give the street a larger place". Two techniques complement the collage. For some pieces (Bowie, Gainsbourg), he runs the posters through chromalux, cuts them up again and reassembles them like a puzzle under Plexiglas. He also makes sculptures in resin and polyvinyl: the sheet is heated in an oven, then worked with a blowtorch during the short time the material stays supple — manual work in which each piece is unique and the failures are broken.

Laurent Durrey was born in 1967 in Bordeaux, where he lives and works. Self-taught — his first website presented him as a "self-taught Bordelais" — he came to collage and the visual arts through salvage and recycling, with the idea of giving a new life to everyday objects "often thrown out on our doorstep or forgotten at the back of a drawer". From 2007 his activity was organised around Atelier 18, a studio-gallery at 18 quai de Bacalan in Bordeaux, a few hundred metres from the CAPC. He showed his first pieces there in June 2007, then took part every year in the Parcours d'Art des Chartrons, from 2008 to 2011. From 2009 his work left Bordeaux: the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris in 2009, 2010 and 2011, Art Bastille, the Grand Marché d'Art Contemporain at Bastille and Chatou, the Halle Freyssinet, and the Salon des Antiquaires et de l'Art Contemporain in Bordeaux. In the early 2010s several French galleries showed him on a permanent basis: Espace Nollet in Paris, Next in Toulouse, Cannes Croisette, Le Vieux Saint-Paul in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and Sainte-Catherine in Honfleur. In 2020 the birthplace of François Mitterrand, in Jarnac, gave him carte blanche for the European Heritage Days. He is now represented by Galerie Calderone, which published a monograph on him in 2022 and presented his work at Lille Art Up! in 2025.