Naomi Lautier (Paris, 2011) is 14 years old and paints as if the world speaks to her in its own language. There is not a single learned gesture in his work nor a desire to fit into recognizable traditions. His thing is born from another place: a direct, almost physical relationship with what he sees, what he feels and what he needs to express. She is on the autism spectrum, but that does not prevent her from storming the art world: she participates in a group exhibition at Espacio 123 in Barcelona and then begins a journey that will take her through a dozen individual exhibitions across half the globe. The art world is about to meet Naomi Lautier.
“It all started with the flowerpot incident,” his parents, Joel and Alissa Lautier, recall with a smile. They lived in a town in Barcelona (they now live in Malaga, where they chat with EL PAÍS in perfect Spanish and where Naomi goes to school) when Naomi started painting a flower pot in her rental house. Then he went on to paint a wooden fence and then… “then it became clear that, if we didn’t find canvases urgently, the next exhibition would be the walls of the house,” laughs Alissa. That domestic scene marked a point of no return. “It was no longer a game. It was an attentive, almost investigative look,” they explain.
Since then, painting stopped being an activity and became a necessity: it is through art that Naomi relates to the world, and her parents have left her all the space possible to develop as an artist. Joel, 53, and Alissa, 45, have learned to accompany this process without interfering. “We don’t combine it, we adapt,” they say when talking about their condition within the autism spectrum. “Autism does not interfere with your childhood, it makes it different: more subtle, more concentrated, sometimes more fragile, but at the same time surprisingly profound,” says Joel. In her daily life, this translates into constant attention to her daughter’s internal rhythms, in a coexistence with a sensitivity that does not allow haste. “Where others simply look, she observes. Where others pass by, she stays. And we believe that shows in her art.”
Naomi works in series, repeating motifs that evolve over time: complex shapes made up of colored dots, bubbles, fruits, animals. “There is its own logic that is not evident,” explain his parents. The animals—rats, roosters, wooden horses—are repeated as symbols charged with emotion: “They are not just images. They are carriers of an internal state,” says Alissa. “For her, color is an event: a flash, a tension, an energy that arises in the moment,” Joel completes. “There is something very childish and very adult in what he does, like a memory that does not disappear.” Naomi and her art are not professional. She has no gallery to represent her and until now everything has been under the timid initiative of her mother and word of mouth. Which has meant that, after this Friday, it begins an international tour that includes stops in Malaga, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Dubai (with two exhibition spaces of its own at World Art Dubai, which was going to be held in April, but has been postponed to November), Pisa and several cities in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. They will be the first public exhibitions of a unique artist, whose origins can be traced to her family and a series of casual but essential collaborations.
Art as therapy
Naomi has never taken drawing or painting classes (she doesn’t even let her parents see how she paints in her room), but before that language found the canvas as its main territory, there was a key space in her development: Anna Andreu’s art therapy workshop, in Premià de Dalt (Barcelona). He arrived there when he was 10 years old, at a delicate moment. “It was the first time that her mother was separated from her,” recalls Andreu, on the terrace of a cafeteria in his town. “I barely spoke Spanish, I screamed a lot,” he recalls. In that context, the work did not begin with paint, but with the tactile: “What interested her at the beginning was the salt dough, she needed to knead, she used kilos and kilos of flour.” Andreu laughs. She understood that access to Naomi’s creative world passed through the body: “We made cookies, things that could be eaten… at first she painted with chocolate.” The workshop, where Naomi stayed for a couple of years – until the family moved to Malaga – functioned as an open laboratory.
“She had total freedom to try,” explains Andreu, who remembers that Naomi then began to paint on dough, on paper, on any available surface. “He had his OCD, and he needed to touch everything. On one occasion he ate one of his own creations! But beyond the anecdote, I think an emotional evolution began: he began to socialize with other children for the first time.” And he remembers moments of great intensity: “The only time he cried was when a child took away the color yellow. I thought that crying is the most human thing we have.” The relationship between the two was profound: “She was my student, my patient… she taught me a lot. I learned to listen without doing anything, to not want to heal. To be silent.” Today, seeing her evolution, she does not hide her emotion: “It is a privilege to have had her with me and to see what she is doing now.” Today Naomi no longer screams: she goes to school with a companion, her character is very different and her classmates are delighted with her.
Jump and recognition
Institutional recognition has come almost unexpectedly. “It all happened by chance,” say Naomi’s parents. Curator Natalia Shustova discovered her work in the domestic environment: “Not in a gallery, but at home, she was introduced to us by mutual friends.” His reaction was immediate: those paintings had to be shown. The first thing Shustova saw “was an octopus, almost from an early Dalinian period, but there were many of his paintings around the house.” The curator felt the urgency to take her to the exhibition space, although not without initial resistance from her parents due to Naomi’s age. “We had to organize something,” remembers Shustova, who proposed taking paintings to a charity auction linked to the Ronald McDonald Foundation in 2023; There one of his pieces was sold for the first time.
Since then, this art expert has closely followed an evolution that she describes in almost organic terms: “She works in series, increasingly deeper, as if she were climbing a ladder.” For Shustova, Naomi’s painting is not a medium but rather her own language: “She hardly speaks; it is with the brush that she communicates with the world.” And in that communication he recognizes an unusual technical quality and a “very elaborate” sensitivity to color, which seems to develop at its own pace. At the same time, she insists on not reducing her reading to diagnosis: “I don’t want her to be treated like a handicapped person; it is precisely her way of being in the world that allows her to transmit what she transmits.” The seal of quality has not only been printed by Shustova: thanks to social networks, many institutions and personalities have praised or have been interested in Naomi’s work, from the management of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (Macba) to the prestigious American art critic Jerry Saltz, through artists such as Javier de Juan.
José María Luna, who is now cultural director of the Unicaja Foundation, first met Joel Lautier when he was responsible for several museums in Malaga. The truth is that the life of Naomi’s parents has its own story: Alissa is half Russian, half Ukrainian, and Joel, half French, half Japanese, is a chess grandmaster, was a candidate for the world title in 1994 and defeated Kasparov on several occasions. In the context of the chess tournament in Malaga they met and, after seeing Naomi’s work, Luna offered them a space at the Russian Museum in Malaga. “He had no academic training, but he did have enormous technical skill and, above all, a world of his own,” remembers Luna. “He has to grow as a person and as an artist, of course, he has a way to go, but his ability to build a universe and transfer it is brutal.” Luna shifts the focus of recognition to a more essential dimension: “The most important thing, actually, is that this helps Naomi grow as a person.”
Accomplices behind the camera
Naomi is not just a painter. Its exhibitions will also show installations, collage and video. This evolution has been closely observed by a friend with whom Naomi has developed the most recent stage of her art: Eugine Hrotchuk, a 37-year-old Ukrainian photographer who arrived in Spain 20 years ago. The meeting between the two was coincidental. “One day her mother came to see some paintings I had on the street and told me: ‘Naomi is also an artist,’” Hrotchuk recalls. From there, the relationship grew organically: “When I saw her work for the first time, I was very surprised. I didn’t imagine that a 14-year-old girl could create something with so much meaning.” Together they have done photography and video. “At the base of our work there is always the artistic idea of a performancein which Naomi stars as the actress. My role in this process is not to reinterpret or modify it, but rather to carefully enter that space and try to translate its language into photography, without breaking its internal logic.” Several series have emerged from that collaboration (in addition to a friendship), such as a black and white one with Naomi as Mickey Mouse. “Naomi, as an artist, does not have the usual filters with which we usually perceive the world. Perhaps this has to do with her autistic perception, which is completely different: purer, more direct, born from within, without trying to please anyone,” Hrotchuk points out accurately. “She transmits the world with a very particular honesty and sensitivity, as if she captured what happens in the air and transferred it to the canvas. That purity and intensity mean that his work does not leave anyone indifferent.”
That purity is, in the end, what Naomi’s parents value most: “When we saw her first exhibition we felt like we were seeing her world in its entirety for the first time. And we understood: this is just the beginning.” “For any artist, with or without autism, it is important to be heard and understood,” they emphasize. Naomi’s own voice is ready to be shown around the world, in a journey that perhaps has a more important dimension even than the artistic one: “The really important thing is not so much that it finds a place in the world of art,” José María Luna concludes, “but that it finds a place in life.” Painting and art as consolation, as obsession, as home, as permanent center of gravity. “If success comes, if in a few decades we talk about her as an important figure, then great,” says Luna, “but the really important thing is to understand that she is happy doing this.” Perhaps that is the key to everything: in that silent and stubborn happiness, in that need to create without asking permission, Naomi has already found what is essential long before the world sets its eyes on her.
