Paris-based artist Laurent Proux’s paintings are centered around the human body, machinery, and  labor. In Fire on the hills, Proux paints a large body enveloped and squeezed within itself ⎯ the  subject’s mouth gasping out from between its legs. Proux’s practice of depicting fragmented bodies is  intended to draw a link between the body and the industrial machine; bringing the two together as  one; the body only a jumble of parts: grotesque and politicized. The fleshy reds and pinks of the skin  mirror the ruddy clouds in the sky and the cracked earth the figure rests upon. Proux’s body-as machine is an investigation of modernity and a rejection of the traditional abstract or figurative  dichotomy. Proux is represented by Semiose.