Ludovic Beillard at Deborah Bowmann

Artist: Ludovic Beillard

Exhibition title: SKYDECK SCARE

Venue: Deborah Bowmann, Brussels, Belgium

Date: November 17, 2017 – January 11, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Deborah Bowmann, Brussels

Late evening on May 28, 2014, the Skydeck at Willis Tower, which allows tourists to stand on a glass ledge more than 1,300 feet above Chicago, cracked under the weight of visitors. According to NBC, a Californian family stepped out onto the Skydeck that night only to hear a cracking sound and see the glass fragmenting under their feet. «I looked down and I could see it cracking and lines going through the glass so we immediately just jumped off as fast as we could,» Garibay told CNN affiliate WGN.

DEBORAH BOWMANN BRUXELLES, Deborah Bowmann and her representatives are happy to present Skydeck Scare, a show by Ludovic Beillard.

Skydeck Scare displays Ludovic Beillard’s studio. Presenting an ongoing production, the exhibition comes out of a curatorial system that is specific to the artist’s studio which emerges mainly from experimentation. Presenting series of freshly completed works achieved in the exhibition space itself, these elements are to be considered as laid in the artist’s field of vision rather than in our own, revealing and reflecting an intimacy, a system of interrogations and of ongoing research.

If the exhibition allows for a voyeuristic point of view reminiscent of the Skydeck, it also suggests, similarly as the May 28th event at the Willis Tower, a certain form of disenchantment and disillusionment. At the crossroad of fallen loots and archeological findings, a number of works appear as negative trophies, whose ideas of splendour and prominence can only be read as ridiculous, grotesque and futile. Placed at the entrance of the exhibition, the work Dream alone formulates a complementary indication of this vision by proposing a countermovement of this grandiloquent quest of a better self at all costs – the one of withdrawal.

If numerous works seem to bind a particular attention to the tale and the fable by means of diverse personifications descending from rustique and grotesque movements, the various elements in front of us seem to articulate around a parallel story, in which the protagonists are composed of complex materials, mixtures and (sometimes indefinable) agglomerations. All of which, in one way or another, seem at the same time malleable and frozen, shiny and porous, dirty and smooth. If our understanding of the entirety of these attributes is essential to grasp what these sculptures say, the idea of malleability could be of most significance. Ludovic Beillard models and shapes to produce objects that are malleable, stretchable, in order to postpone the necessity of a solidified version to the last instant. As part of an empirical motion, the work is a pure accumulation of numerous and successive layers of materials and gestures.

Moreover, it is also this very stacking which constitutes the main subject of what can appear as one the most defining moments of Skydeck Scare where we find the ground lays a carpet whose main substance appears as a pile of waste, as a heaping up and superposition of materials – an exaggeration of what constitutes the floor of his own workshop. By looking at this so-called artist studio in a new way and proposing an openly theatricalised reading, the work, also entitled Skydeck Scare, crackles under our feet recalling the floor of the Willis Tower after the May 28th event, threatening to symbolically collapse the entire exhibition.

-Christine Tüür, Brussels, 2017