Poetic Defiance

Time and timelessness are entangled in artist Laurent Grasso’s moody environments. The Parisian painter and filmmaker’s paintings and multimedia work embody a poetic detachment, featuring both topographies of a remote past and alarms of a near future. “I try to create places with invisible power and radiation,” he tells Family Style. The appetite to defy the tick of the lock led Nicolas Ghesquière to center his Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2025 Ready-to-Wear collection on Grasso’s “Studies into the Past” series, in which mortality and anticipation are alchemized with nods to 15th and 16th Italian and Flemish masters, as well as galactic sci-fi environments. 

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Uninhabited lands are populated by fiery strays and globular masses are painted in his powdery palette and magnified details as prints across Ghesquière’s loosely-framed silhouettes and handbags. Grasso enjoys the sight of his otherworldly landscapes taking shape in  new dimensions. “I see the clothes as new environments that wrap women who wear them—there is no frame but new narratives,” he says. A similar twist on optic limits is echoed in the collection’s campaign shot by Steven Meisel, which features Blackpink’s Lisa and Saoirse Ronan in front of enlarged replicas of Grasso’s painting.

Ghesquière’s parallel quest for subjective temporality first introduced him to Grasso’s practice a decade ago at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, where the artist’s paintings and sculptures were on view. “I think he was waiting for the right moment,” says Grasso about their collaboration, which embodies the harmony of two kindred thinkers. Meisel’s sleek lens adds another layer, capturing the energy of Grasso’s traditionally uninhabited landscape, which the artist describes as “cold and strange.” In fact, Grasso has always enjoyed observing people standing by his paintings. “The human presence gives more power to the images,” he says. 

“I don’t want to be recognized by the shape or scale of my work but rather by its spirit and sentiment,” Grasso adds of his enigmatic visual universe. His landscapes illustrate impossibly serene and disarmingly alluring paradises, inspired by Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church’s Amazonian paintings. He then interrupts this serene familiarity with geometric accents that slice and frame the postcard-perfect beauty. “I like to make it impossible to understand whether my world is contemporary or something of the past,” Grasso admits. Unsurprisingly, fashion designers like Ghesquière fascinate him for their ability to travel between histories and the future 

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Despite the culture's prevalent fascination for the blatant today, Grasso strives to achieve mystery. “The world around us is gradually getting boring, because we think we must recognize and understand everything.” He, however, trusts in an enlightenment of sorts that blossoms from what we cannot completely understand.