Ludovic Beillard at Clovis XV

Artists: Ludovic Beillard (with a performance of Coraline Guilbeau)

Exhibition title: Tu vas manger un pied-bouche

Venue: Clovis XV, Brussels, Belgium

Date: February 22 – March 22, 2017

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Clovis XV

“The story of the Yōkai is in every way a real one, you can feel their presence in the shady areas of houses”
-Mizuki

Faced with a Yōkai, undeniably, every man is destitute, somewhat like being naked.

The amount and diversity of Yōkai is incredibly large, many of them being, at the beginning, average humans transformed into something supernatural after a disproportionate emotional state.

The Rokuro-Kubi are, for example, Yōkai monsters whose necks lengthen uncontrollably during the night. The Futakuchi-Onna, are women who have a horrible second mouth behind their heads. Tôfu-kôzo is a small monk who holds a tray with a piece of tofu on it. And the Ashiarai yashiki is a gigantic mud-covered foot that appears from the ceiling of rooms in houses and orders that it be washed, otherwise it will trample and destroy the place. Finally, the Yōkai Ikiryo is its own double, escaping from a body when a person feels such an intense emotion that his soul detaches itself and emerges as an ethereal form. It is Ikiryo who is there when one feels the strange presence of another, close to oneself.

The characters depicted, or sometimes only evoked, by Ludovic Beillard in this exhibition are not, strictly speaking, Yōkai. No more dead than alive. The exhibition Tu vas manger un pied bouche seeks to understand what is at play in the extrapolation of a feeling, or how the power of a feeling could actually come to the point of marking the body. This idea of disproportion, extrapolation and stretching is evident as much as in the chosen subject as it is in the usage of the materials.

In Ludovic Beillard’s work, there is this attempt, not to break, but to stretch the gesture, to twist it to the excess, to shrink the medium one into the other, to distort the material disproportionately, to exaggerate the features. It’s no coincidence that he naturally turned to latex to think and make the sculptures of this exhibition – the natural properties of latex ensuring resistance, flexibility and malleability to a sculpture stretching almost at will -. Already, in his previous series, Ludovic Beillard used latex to make faces that seemed crushed, swollen, tied by the stretching of the material.

The exhibition builds a universe that refers as much to the cartoon language as it does the real one, it dissolves the edges, the silhouettes and the earthly bodies to such an extent that a pair of over-sized baggy-type pants, are missing their structure, the one who wears these pants, as though the body has melted inside. On the other hand, the characters drawn, just like the little puppets of latex show some peculiarities to the least astonishing. All of these characters appear to be hypersensitive, so much so that their limbs and flesh have been deformed and enlarged accordingly to the amplified sensory apparatus (ears, eyes, mouths, etc.). Tu vas manger un pied bouche, is the story in short, of a hyper sensitive protuberance. These beings – who are never represented as many, but always isolated – accompanied by their excessive sensitivity, evolve (or perhaps float) in universes simply evoked by bricks or walls, at the limit of a certain oneirism.

In this perfectly two-colored world, the pastel drawings, even more than the latex sculptures, represent bodies that are no longer bodies. It’s as if these characters were lost in the space-time of their representation, some of them no longer having a clear line delineating their body already caught within the mass. Following the logic of an effacement of the earthly body, these drawings are interesting both for the study of the specific situation that they propose and for the psychology that seems to detach itself from the interior of these bodies. There is something serene in the way these characters look at this in-between environment in which they evolve.

Tu vas manger un pied-bouche explores the porosity between the so-called sensible world and the one that would be next door. Or after.

Tu vas manger un pied-bouche is also the story of a being perhaps too touched, too sensitive at a given moment, and who chose to leave everything aside, finally, to get away from society, and this, perhaps all of a sudden.

Nothing is really real.
Everything is only at a certain moment.

-Coraline Guilbeau