COMME ELLE VA

The Bacqueville Gallery is delighted to present Laurent Delecroix’s second solo show.

Laurent Delecroix creates a body of work that explores the conditions of painting’s existence. Not what it depicts, nor even what it signifies, but what enables it to emerge, to persist and to endure. To this end, the artist establishes protocols that determine the relationships between format, colour, tool, support and exhibition space. These constraints do not seek to control the work but to shift attention towards what makes the pictorial experience possible. Colour emerges gradually. The gesture recedes behind its repetition. The gaze slows.

​From his earliest gradations to his most recent works, Laurent Delecroix thus explores states of liminality. Painting rarely exists here as an assertion. It manifests itself more as a presence in the making, a vibration, a passage between the concrete and the mental. The works sometimes seem to waver between painting and object, surface and architecture, image and experience. They maintain a discreet yet persistent relationship with the world, favouring displacement over demonstration, the gap over the obvious.

‘Comme elle va’ brings together several series created over recent years, as well as a previously unseen group of works developed from old paintings held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Arras. Whilst awaiting restoration, some of these old paintings are partially covered with Japanese paper, intended to preserve the fragile layers of paint. Laurent Delecroix traces the outlines of these protective areas to use them as the starting point for new paintings. The figures disappear. The narratives fade away. All that remains are the surfaces that allow the image to persist when it momentarily ceases to appear.

​This process, however, is neither an archive, nor a quotation, nor a reproduction. It extends a line of inquiry already present throughout his body of work. For a long time, the artist has been shifting the focus towards what silently underpins the emergence of the painting: a light, a rhythm, a protocol, a support, a sound vibration, a space.

 

The works from the Arras Museum bring to light another aspect of this manifestation: care. No longer merely what gives rise to a painting, but what enables it to endure over time. Perhaps for the first time, the painting encounters its own historical vulnerability here. Monochrome, colour, repeated gestures and perceptual experiences are confronted with duration, alteration and the processes that enable images to endure over time.

​The works brought together in the exhibition thus form a series of states. Some seem to emerge from the light. Others develop from discreet devices, objects or architectural elements. Still others take the form of surfaces maintained in a provisional state. All, however, are part of the same quest: to understand what remains when the image recedes, what continues to act when the representation fades, what persists when the painting seems reduced to almost nothing. The exhibition’s title thus functions as a question addressed to painting itself.

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How is it faring?

Not as a nostalgic observation, but as an open-ended question.

How is painting faring today?

What does it still convey?

What can it still produce?

What remains when we strip away the narrative, the subject, the illusion, the image?

From one work to the next, Laurent Delecroix continually re-examines this question. And whilst the answers remain uncertain, here they take the form of silent surfaces, lingering colours, repeated gestures and fragile presences that, despite everything, continue to endure.


Exhibition on view from 25 June to 31 July 2026.

Opening on Thursday 25 July 2026, 6.00 pm – 9.30 pm.

In the presence of the artist.

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Image above: Laurent Delecroix, Painting Metod #4, 2026. Fluorescent acrylic paint applied with a brush, metal frame. Variable dimensions. View of the exhibition at L'être lieu, 2026. Photo: Laurent Delecroix