Born in Mont Saint Martin, France, Lapuh moved to the USA in 1973 after a short stint working as a stone cutter in Zurich, Switzerland. He began his art studies in sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art.
In 1976, while traveling overland from France to India and on to Australia, Lapuh’s emphasis shifted to drawing and painting. Coming back to the United States in the spring of 1977, he spent two years in Florida. His first show, featuring surrealistic figurative works, was in West Palm Beach.
Throughout the eighties, Lapuh’s paintings became progressively more abstract. Texture and form took precedence over narration. Sculpture reappeared in his work as he began to build out his canvases. He began to focus on the contrast between flat and 3-dimensional forms and between the real and the illusory.
At this time, Lapuh developed a whole series on prison. The idea of being imprisoned within a cube gave birth to the ‘corner’, the point at which walls meet. Hightly textured canvases and muted colors were characteristic. Now even more abstract in its form, the ‘corner’ is still a major theme in his work.
Lapuh received his Diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1989, completing the Fifth Year Program there in 1990. After his first public showings in Boston (1990-92), Lapuh began to move away from formal, almost rigid forms, to more organic and emotionally charged shaped-paintings. He moved the sculptural element to the edges of the canvas and experimented with vivid colors on the flat surface in between. Brilliant red, yellow, orange and blue were new to his work.
2002 marked a return to basic geometric forms on rectangular canvases. Lapuh began to experiment with repeating patterns of raised geometric shapes, each slightly tilted at an angle, and painted to give a greater illusion of depth. As one critic noted, “One can get lost in the depths of [the paintings'] visual possibilities as the eye jumps back and forth from level to level of interaction, with a nearly infinite number of delightful juxtapositions to savor.”
In his most recent work, Lapuh retakes organic forms in his shaped-paintings and now small sculpture. Past, present or future, Lapuh's visually captivating work is characterized by complexity, inventiveness and meticulous craftsmanship. His devotion to abstraction continues to reward viewers with an ever-evolving body of original works of art. |