The Age - Domain - April 2003 - PDF file
Noosa Style - Autumn 2003 - PDF file
Noosa Weekender - May 2003 - PDF file
Artist's Palette - November 2003 - PDF file
Antiques & Art - December 2003 - PDF file
Travel is an everyday part of life. We travel to work, to shop or perhaps to visit friends. We likewise travel to exotic places, seeing wonders of civilisation and of nature. Then there is a third kind of travel, the inward or spiritual kind, the journey which everyman must make as part of the passage of life. Laurent Filippini, who was born in Paris, knows all three. First there was the busy life of a leading designer involved in the hectic world of advertising and surrounded by the pressures and pleasures of life in one of the most sophisticated cities in the world. As a news photographer, he participated in the drama on the world stage, travelling through Asia, and to North and South America. Yet, in his creative journey within photography, he found that something was lacking, that the verisimilitude of the photographic image had its limitations; missing were the ideas and passions that were retained in the mind and soul of the participator. So the artist was conceived and the painter born to capture and express this third journey, inextricably bound up with the other two.
Filippini the traveller found in Australia the grandeur, beauty and colours that gave him both the outer forms for expression and the inner spirituality of the land, of which the Aboriginal peoples are so much a part. And so it is with his art, his paintings being visual expressions of his inner journeys, the material and spiritual being as one.
This is seen in Desert Dust 2003 where the exploration of the Australian Outback and the painter's inner world combine in a painting rich in colour and layered meanings. It began out-of-doors at Broken Hill amid all the heat, dust, sand and flies, and was completed in the studio. This approach has given the work an abundant duality found in the initial immediacy of response to the landscape and then filtered through the mind and being of the artist to present an equally meditative work. It is not a landscape in the direct meaning of the word. It is rather a sensation of the place, where the senses can delight in the various stimuli and then ascend to a higher plane of perception. Desert Dust is a narrative in which the desert is a metaphor through which thoughts of life and the journey are captured in ravishing colours of rich and pale golds, orange reds and yellows, and an extraordinary sky of vertical lines of blue. It is raining, or rather it materialises the desert dream of the awaited rain, refreshing and life giving.
Other paintings take up these same ideas and journey through the inner and outer landscapes with them. [No title], a studio work, travels in the artist's world, his "my world", the vision of the mirage on the horizon being a metaphor for the goal, that which is sought after in life. The movement is always upward. Far Away, a commanding work through its use of powerful reds and blacks, by comparison, had its genesis out-of-doors. There are visual references to the sacred rock, Uluru, protectively surrounding the rectangle of gold – again the artist's goal – while abstracted bush is found in the blue and white paint. At the top is the sun, representing life.
Cast aside rational exploration and let the senses lead the mind into another sphere enhanced by the bronze mist of golden red. Filippini's paintings bring dreams to people's homes. They can be shared with the artist if the viewer allows aesthetic pleasure and meditation to be his or her companions on their journey into this empowering other world.
David Thomas
Melbourne
21 February 2003