Stephanie Laleuw

Featured photo: Veduta della mostra “Pour quels motifs?” La Manufacture, Roubaix, 2023
Source: https://stephanielaleuw.com/

Stéphanie Laleuw is a visual artist who graduated with honors from the Ecole Supérieure d’Art (Esa) du Nord Pas de Calais in 2019. She lives and works in Loos, near Lille. Trained as an engineer, she has dedicated herself to her artistic research since 2014.

“I want to celebrate life and living beings.”

Echoing the complex entanglements of nature, the infectious energy of carnival, and the colorful world of the marketplace, the ornaments in Stéphanie Laleuw’s work multiply, proliferate, intertwine, and spill out of the canvas, eventually occupying the entire space.

Borrowing from the vocabulary of refinement and plant life, they connect two worlds that are simultaneously evoked: that of an art history attached to the formal preoccupation with saturating the surface and that of folk art. To this dialogue, the artist adds vernacular and familiar elements such as grandmother’s curtains or grandfather’s overalls, making his formalism less neutral. In this case, the ornament is no longer reduced to its additive character, but is (for) the work.

The integration of elements considered minor, in contrast to more conceptual contemporary art, makes ornament a topical issue, highlighting less visible identities. By overlaying codes historically associated with the female gender-patterns, textiles, embroidery-the artist questions the visibility of women and, more generally, of social and cultural minorities

The facings created by her great-grandmother, made four-handed with her grandmother and then with seamstresses and knitters – those of the Manufacture Gang – as part of collaborative projects, fill her works.

From the domestic sphere to public space, the artist in turn tells a new story and builds a bridge between art and life. In an exuberant play of patterns, colors and materials, Stéphanie Laleuw invites us into the heart of living things.