Laurent Bétremieux occupies an original position in digital art: his work does not disown the tradition of drawing and figurative painting, but passes through and transforms them through the use of digital tools. His women run, carry, dance — they always seem on the verge of overflowing the frame, of crossing the surface to reach the viewer. This energy is not anecdotal: Bétremieux sees in the female figure a symbol of humanity in all its fullness and contradictions.

The “World Bearer” he summons is not an exotic cliché or a frozen symbol, but a living presence, rooted in a long history and in an urgent present. The artist's technique — combining digital media and paper, printing and manual intervention — creates surfaces at once smooth and tactile, modern and archaic. This formal hybridisation reflects a vision of the world that refuses simple oppositions: past and present, local and universal, fixed and moving merge into a declaration of vitality as stubborn as it is necessary.

Bétremieux's women run “as fast as all their speeds”, as a little girl once put it, but only to stay in place, at the heart of movement. Here and now, the painter seems to assert. Today more than ever, when the ground seems to be giving way beneath our feet. It is not so much Woman as the human species that these women embody — and they do so better than men, because they have only recently burst onto the stage of History and it is now their turn to tell it. . Look at this black “World Bearer”, not to please the spirit of the times but because she is the origin. From the origin, unnameable, unnamed, humankind carries the world, a new Atlas, to its misfortune and its glory. It carries it because it speaks it. Because it tells it, makes a story of it. And who is the first to tell the story? She is: woman.

Laurent Bétremieux's painting is an urgent invitation to have faith — not in the outcome of this struggle, which we all know, but in the power of Art that shows it, transfigures it and nourishes it with the most vital forces.