Artist: Ferre Leriche (aka Bleper)
Exhibition title: Nowhere and Back Again
Venue: KIOSK, Ghent, Belgium
Date: September 14 – November 10, 2024
Photography: ©Isabelle Arthuis / All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and KIOSK, Ghent
Note: Exhibition text is available here
Ferre Leriche (aka Bleper) is an artist who explores the boundary between visual art and comic art. His drawings often take aim at himself and his fellow humans. He focuses on self-introspection, interpersonal contact, and relations between people and their environment.
For the exhibition Nowhere and Back Again, Bleper starts from Willy, a comic character he created ten years ago on the Bijloke arts campus, when he took his first steps towards cartoons, drawing, and being an artist. Willy was a parody of the “true Fleming,” an ideological concept in which the then art student saw an enemy.
During the preparations for the show at KIOSK, Bleper, now richer in experience, discovered that his bond with Willy, the caricatured Fleming, had changed. His original ideological approach needed revision: years of working in the social sector, special youth care, a period as a self-employed person, and six years of living in a poor suburb of Ghent had left their mark on the once so young, naive, and hopeful student.
Time has not stood still physically either: wrinkles, a beard, and a lot less hair. Willy, originally drawn from photos of the artist, has undergone the same metamorphosis. Willy has taken shape again, no longer based on a superficial reading of a hated concept, but through self-examination. Some of the little edges that the artist once detested in his fellow Flemings seem to have crept into him too. He seems to be fine with that. Through drawings and sound works, Bleper introduces the viewer to these facets of Willy and himself.
Nowhere and Back Again, the title of the exhibition, speaks for itself: the artist returns, no heroic act having taken place, no injustice removed from the world. Daily life has proven demanding enough.
