Exclusive Interview with Lauren Marsolier

be-Art magazine: You use that light blue all over your photos, is that for you a signature? a way to extract even more the landscape from the reality?

Lauren Marsolier: My intent in using an almost solid looking sky is not to make it a signature, but to infuse a slight sense of enclosure and artificiality, similar to what we experience when looking at a diorama. My images are built around the experience of feeling disoriented and disconnected from one's surroundings. They are my interpretation of a world that has lost its certainties, and where there is no more clear boundaries between the real and the fake. One can't tell for sure what is real or what has been manipulated or constructed. My photomontages usually give rise to contradictory interpretations. One often gets a vague feeling that something is off, without being able to pinpoint where their malaise comes from.

be-Art magazine: In which way living in Los Angeles influences your art?

Lauren Marsolier: Los Angeles has been a great inspiration for my work, because it contains all the contradictions that I explore in my images. It is vibrant, attractive, airy and at the same time it is easy to find yourself lost and disconnected here. LA is a patchwork of styles from all over the world, and at the same time it is very unique. It blends artifice in daily life in some uncanny way and it is not unusual to feel like you must have accidentally walked into a set. I lived in Venice for some years, which was initially created as an amusement park. The thought that I was living in what used to be a decors doesn't cease to amaze me.


be-Art magazine: In his correspondence with many friends De Chirico explains how he came to his specific genre I realized that there are a lot of strange things, unknown, solitary, which can be translated into painting; I have long thought. Then I started having the first revelations how does it work for you? where the inspiration comes from?

Lauren Marsolier: For me inspiration comes from feelings, thoughts that are both nagging and elusive. Turning them into images allows me to look at them a little closer and hopefully make some sense of them. Art is a wonderful practice because it engages some many layers of ourselves. I like your quote of Chirico and I like Chirico as a painter, because he was able to convey in his work something intangible, an experience. What I see in his paintings are not so much a landscape, but what it felt like to live in his time: the beginnings of modernity, automation, loneliness in large urban settings, humanity dwarfed by large stone figures of another time and their endless shadows,... His paintings ( and painting in general) are also an endless source of inspiration for me.