Artists: Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard
Exhibition title: je n’entends plus aucune voix
Venue: Lindre-Basse residency, Delme, France
Date: April 24, 2020 – July 12, 2021
Photography: Ludovic Beillard / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Lindre-Basse residency
Artists Angélique Aubrit and Ludovic Beillard do not regard themselves as a duo, preferring to see their occasional collaborations as “discussions” lead- ing to common works. Angélique Aubrit’s works are very often made of textile— following DIY principles—as much from necessity as for the resulting aesthetic. Her creations depict the narratives of vacillating, present or absent characters affected by disappointing, even desperate social situations. Inspired by genre cinema and recent philosophy, her dark narrative arcs take shape in formless, liquified or slumped creations. A soft destruction appears in their cheap, shiny silk fabrics, which seem to have come straight out of the kitsch interior of a middle-class American pavilion of the 1970s. There reigns a neurotic psychological state that approaches madness, but does not allow itself to be observed from the outside, since it concerns the observer no less than the observed. The artist does not keep visitors at a distance in her environments, she rather includes them as participants in the sense of uneasiness, as if each work seemed to say to the person who encounters it: “this could be you…”. Yet Angélique Aubrit rejects all pessimism, and in this work, it is a matter of accepting a state of civilisation, a reality, in order to write its new forms of collective release.
Ludovic Beillard’s art leads towards a universe where stories, legends, theatre of the absurd, and medieval imaginary worlds combine with our contemporary era at its most brutal and hazy: among his contemporaries, the artist researches the evolution and externalisation of the cases of people seeking to get away from society, the way recluses and Franciscan monks once did, and visionnary figures do today, mole-men living in city basements, etc. He more particularly examines how these people construct their living environ- ment according to their means, creating veritable theatre scenery for which they alone are the audience. Therefore, in Ludovic Beillard’s work there is something of the anxiety-inducing mise-en-scène, of the grotesque attitude, of gloomy sounds, a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk1 that is less flamboyant than in Wagner’s conception: in the artist’s work, the sensations are more telluric, earthier, as if buried in the wet clay from which sculptures often arise. One does not find flights of lyricism in the artist’s universe, but rather a reverse flight towards a psychotic individualism vainly seeking an escape through itself. If his creations are total and generous, caught in exhibitions operating as units in which each work acts as a poetic verse, they bury things in a Kafkaesque burrow or cesspool, like those the artist views in Urbex2 videos.
Together, they share this taste for those universes, particularly for com- media dell’arte, mime, puppet shows, different forms of popular theatre, as well as for emotional states, depression, mourning, funereal atmospheres. On the occasion of their residency at Lindre-Basse, the artists will develop what they see as an itinerant theatre, for which they will be the directors, costume designers and prop team. They wish to take inspiration from the notion of the “village” in the broad sense, in order to construct a refuge-chamber, where spectators will be invited to come inside and discover a collection of characters and strange objects, haunted by a troop of evanescent spirits.
[1] A “total work of art”, that includes within itself all artistic disciplines, techniques and mediums
[2] Urbex means “urban exploration”, a practice consisting in visiting places built and abandoned by human beings
