ALEXIS LAURENT

ALEXIS LAURENT

Born in Paris, France in 1969, artist Alexis Laurent left the city with his parents as a toddler and was raised during the 1970s and 80s in rural Southern France. Throughout his early youth Laurent watched his formally trained artist parents working 6 months out of each year selling crepes for 4 hours a day in the little village of Biot, and dedicating the rest of their year to creating and selling their jewelry. Following his parents divorce at the age of seven, Laurent and his sister moved with their father, occasionally an uncle, and two dogs, to what he describes as a 180 sq. ft. hill top cabin, “just nearly the size of the entrance I’ve built for my San Francisco studio”. 

With little room for childhood games within the family cabin, Laurent spent a large portion of his youth outside exploring the natural world, or when the weather did not permit, within his father’s jewelry workshop. It was in his father’s workshop; where Laurent spent hours playing with materials, mixtures and tools of the trade; that he began to experiment with many of the tools and skill-sets that are present in his artistic lexicon today.

Raised by an unconventional, ‘big city’ family, who had moved into a traditional close-knit agricultural village, Laurent largely grew up as an outsider, with the ‘Do it Your Own Way’ mentality instilled in him through his parent’s examples of career and livelihood. Similar to his parents, Laurent embraced the gift of freedom and curiosity as a ways and means to create and build his own dreams. However, unlike his family who took a bohemian approach to life, Laurent decided at a young age never to be confined due to societal preconceptions or financial constraints, and so it has been.

Upon graduation with advanced university degrees from Aix-en-Provence and the elite Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po Paris) in the 1990s, Laurent moved to the United States with his American wife and went on to forge a lucrative international business career in executive boardroom consulting.  Switching career gears a few years following the dot com bust, Laurent briefly entered the world of architecture and design, a trade and skill-set he also learned from his father who throughout his childhood was in the constant process of building the family’s home, and one that would eventually lead to the creation of his sculptures.

Following the birth of his first child in 2003, Laurent began to re-think his career trajectory and decided to return to France with his wife and infant daughter for a two and half year sabbatical. It was during this return to the South of France that Laurent began to hone his artistic skills, techniques and concepts, and to create the dominant lexicon and narrative for his artistic vision. “France was a place where we cocooned. Without the constraints of a traditional job I was able to be in a state of creative incubation, reopening old draws from my childhood, re-examining what’s in them, and seeing how my past was going to mix with my new skills and my future. It was about figuring out how it is was all going to gel.” Returning to the States with his family in 2006, Laurent dedicated himself full-time to large-scale painting, with a permanent studio and sculpting soon to join the mix.

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