Artist: Edouard Le Boulc’h
Exhibition title: Peripheral Feed
Venue: Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France
Date: February 3 – April 28, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain
It’s a TV show. Apparently a French one, a little dated, from the 1980s perhaps. The set displays vintage audiovisual codes with turtleneck pullovers, neutral greyish backdrops, scanning screens and transparent tables. All of this in a chromatic tone strangely dull for a TV show. It looks like black and white in technicolor … Questioned by a presenter, an American yogi master presents a new reflexology communication program of his invention supposedly revolutionnary in the science of relationships between human beings. On several occasions, the TV signal glitches like on an old VHS tape that starts to tire.
The whole atmosphere summarize pretty well Edouard Le Boulc’h’s approach that stands somewhere in between sophistication, humor and sagacity.
As bleak as it may be, it would be hazardous to reduce Edouard Le Boulc’h’s universe to a simple and applied expression of generational anxiety. But the fact remains that this emerging artist belongs to the first generation which hasn’t known the world before the digital revolution and which now wonders what the communication implied then.
Would there be some nostalgia in his work ? It would rather be a proof of lucidity. And obviously, for the artist, the past and its occurrences are above all a matter of enlightening the present. Forty years after the cathartic film Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1974), in our present society that offers standardized meals of substitution to our varied food, one can admit the young artist’s relevance.
Peripheral Feed is a visual and sound fictional score, a variation on a certain end of the world…
The movie Affect TV, 2018 has been developped in collaboration with Antonin Gerson, Gwénaël Bodet and Isaac Foxsyth.
