LplusL started working together on a professional base in 1997. From then on, artistic tools for their art production evolved from painting to photography, animation, marketing, branding and finally Internet.
A constant theme in the work of LplusL is the questioning of the position and the role of the artist. Artists are getting more and more corporate. They recruite specialized employees and easily make use of external services to produce work. The individuality of the artist stays vital, but is backed by a team of professionals and assistants. It isn’t enough to come up with a good idea. The realization of it and the follow-up is at least as important. Therefore, today’s artist needs entrepreneurship and leadership more than ever. Not only a creative mind…
Another returning theme is the mundialisation of the economy and society. Due to several actual phenomena such as booming, formerly isolated markets, boundarylessness, Internet revolution, democratization of commercial air traffic, … it became possible to be present almost everywhere in the world. The work of LplusL highlights the possibilities that this new world offers us.
“Art throughout its history went from simple representation, to symbolization and ended up -as modernism shows us- in pure abstraction. Abstraction, is the last stage in the formation of the mind and psychology of an individual. So, what comes next for art? What comes next for modernism? I dare to say: the end of individualism.
The path of individual creators seems to be reaching an end at least on what regards the traditional arts. And the Internet, as a powerful distribution model with creative technologies available for anyone, is leading towards collective forms of creation. Where the individual follows a guiding theme and offer what they have to say in that context” – Santiago Siri.
In 2004 they launched “Artmann”, an art project aimed to democratize contemporary art. Experimenting with different painting styles created on computer, they employed for the first time Chinese artist studios for the production of the paintings.
LplusL’s latest undertaking, Axel King (www.axelking.com), seemed to be the logical next step. Virtual artist King is the face of a machine producing paintings. In this experiment, LplusL only conceived and then helped to contruct the system. The role of the artists stopped here, supervising and maintaining if necessary.
LplusL is the artist name of the Leroy Brothers. Gregory and Nicolas are responsible for the artistic and creative side of the business, while Gilles is focusing on showing the work to the world. Born in 1975, 1978 and 1979 in Ghent, Belgium, they studied respectively Marketing in Antwerp and Fine Art at the art academy Villa Arson, Nice (France) then at the London Metropolitan University, London. They had several shows in galleries and museums in Belgium, The Netherlands and France, and are preparing their launch in Asia from September 2010 onwards. They will kick-off in Shanghai.
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