'Night Fall' by Lauren Coullard at Lily Robert, Paris

Lauren Coullard's painting germinates and feeds itself into a systematic short circuit between abstraction and figuration, mythology and fiction. Her works exhume a “d'antan” imagery, jovially neo-medieval, chivalrous and religious, populated by dames, virgins and docile beasts — strictly courtly and mostly female. A pictorial reboot with echoes from Neo Expressionism and Transavanguardia leads to incursions into metaphysical and symbolist realms. The artist imposes confidently and proudly an anachronistic transfiguration of the present. It is more than a carnival parade, or any sort of nostalgic tribute, almost as if she were seeking to redeem the contemporary life from its schizophrenic, harsh and inconclusive narrations. Oneiric, epic, archaic and almost pagan, the characters of her works seem stuck to a world with an evanescent gravity, a theatrical set romantically adorned. They rise from the artist's unstoppable desire to snatch light from the darkness of the canvas.

In Night Fall, her first solo show at Lily Robert, Lauren Coullard triggers a further temporal switch, moving the cursor over a science-fictional galaxy. Her lineup of ancestral figures is staged here to officiate and derail Isaac Asimov's novella from which the exhibition derives its name. It narrates the coming of darkness on a planet perpetually illuminated by sunlight—more precisely, by six simultaneous suns. Its inhabitants are terrified by the advent of the night and its obscurity and the prophecy of an imminent total eclipse by a religious sect throws them into blind desperation. Recovering the philosophical tradition of Enlightenment and the conscious use of the rationality against every obscurantist drift of power, the story is structured around the metaphor of the relationship between light and darkness.

— Fabio Santacroce