The Elohim Dance
Arthur de Laforcade
- Sitter: Luke Roberts
- Medium: Oil on Canvas
- Dimensions: 120cm x 175cm
- Representation: This artist represents themselves
- Categories: Performing arts and music industry
About the artwork
Luke Roberts is one of Brisbane’s most significant and enduring performance artists, whose decades of provocative and shape-shifting work are perhaps best known through his alter ego, Pope Alice. A QCA and QUT graduate, his work is held in major institutions across Australia and internationally, including the QAGOMA Collection, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.
Arthur de Laforcade first encountered Roberts at The Paint Factory in Yeronga, spending several hours listening before he knew the portrait he wanted to make. Roberts stands mid-gesture, cradling a mannequin as if holding something fragile and worth saving, while behind him the background burns and darkens. A moment of calm, dancing peacefully as the world collapses into chaos. The diversity of paint application, from tender, precise figurative work to raw abstraction, reflects the complexity of the man it depicts.
About the artist
Arthur de Laforcade is a self-taught French graffiti writer and painter, leaving Paris in 2010, spending five years in Benin, West Africa, and another five across Southeast Asia before settling in Brisbane. His work moves fluidly between figurative painting and abstract expressionism, often within the same canvas. He exhibits internationally and is currently based at The Paint Factory in Yeronga.
