Starting over and failing again at Deborah Bowmann

Artists: Rémi Lambert, Ludovic Beillard and Deborah Bowmann Studio

Exhibition title: Starting over and failing again

Venue: Deborah Bowmann, Brussels, Belgium

Date: March 18 – May 15, 2016

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

The distinction between a swell and a wave is quite subtle. Substantially, swells are oscillations of sinusoidal profiles generated by distant weather systems, most often formed in great oceans over long durations of time and vast distances, and thus representing only a moderate danger. In contrast, waves, or what sailors call “the wind sea”, are generated by local winds and are under the direct influence of the mechanisms that create them. When the speed of the wind generating the waves increases, it is said that the sea is “unchained” or “upset”, and the wavelength and amplitude increase. Above a wind speed of 6 meters per second, the amplitude of the wave grows faster than the length so that the degree of curvature increases and forms a sort of menacing “spoon”, that holds such awesome energy that the amplitude of the wave in relation to the strength of the wind has the potential to unbalanced the sea. It is in this moment, where the curve surpasses the critical value of 0.66, when the so-called “forks” appear on the crests of the waves.

Deborah Bowmann Brussels, its representatives, and Deborah Bowmann herself are pleased to present the exhibition ‘Starting over and failing again’, a collaboration with Ludovic Beillard and Rémi Lambert.

Starting over and failing again utilizes an imagery specific to serial production in the framework of commercial display, with the simultaneous objective of undermining that same imagery. The exhibition operates as both a game and a gambit, creating a space of inherent contradiction, where from the start, deception seems as though it should be impossible and yet somehow still manages to come in to play. As a sort of voluntary shipwreck, the show focuses on the paradox of a construction that contains its own destruction, failure integrated into intent as a kind of planned obsolescence. The act of resistance found in the artworks extends to the exhibition space and its particular mechanisms.

Starting over and failing again embodies degeneration through an intentional perversion of the real by the fictitious: the two spheres, reality and fiction, contaminating each other in a form of shared exploitation and deterioration. The paintings of Rémi Lambert assert their influence on our reality, a foray into an underground culture, a threatening and seducing world, where as in a dream, landscapes and situations slide into one another. Alternately, the plaster casts of Ludovic Beillard enact a simulated balance of power, a motionless struggle between accident and repair, the embodiment of a fight between the imagined and the real where the outcome is known from the start.

The serial nature of these objects, repeated according to different logics of mimicry and variation, produces a displacement of the effect of fascinating from the single to the multiple, counterbalancing the expressionist qualities of the series and eventually introducing a deep sense of doubt in regards to the sincerity of the gesture being performed. Through its repetition and thus its affirmation, the effect of this heady multiplicity transforms the exhibition space as much as the particular relationships between the individual works. This form of egalitarian alignment between objects is found again in the presence of six detergent bottles, the possible relics of an abandoned store. Left there intentionally, these bottles underline and at the same time negate the separation between cultural consumption and ordinary consumption, proposing a reading of these different objects outside of any particular hierarchy. In this way, both the artworks and the household products can be considered for their aesthetic qualities as much as for their qualities as consumer goods, for their exhibition value as much as their exchange value.

Deborah Bowmann Studio, Starting over and failing again
Ludovic Beillard, Mens fitness part 1. Red Devils (Roger) and Mens fitness part 1. Red Devils (Tommy)