Tumulus and Softalism at Everyday Gallery

Artists: Leo Luccioni, Thomas Ballouhey, Valentin Vie Bient, Yoel Pytowski / touche-touche

Exhibition title: Tumulus / Softalism

Venue: Everyday Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium

Date: January 18 – February 28, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Everyday Gallery, Antwerp

Tumulus – Group Show with Leo Luccioni, Thomas Ballouhey, Valentin Vie Bient, Yoel Pytowski

Léo Luccioni

Léo Luccioni is a French artist based in Brussels. His practice is derived from printed images and has drifted today to a multi-disciplinary one where all mediums assemble to form a symbolic and narrative scenography.

I’m a forger. Of what is not precious. Of our environment that we consume and throw away. I’m an individual from the consumerist’s society, but nevertheless, I produce with other tools, other materials, other logic and mainly another ambition: The ambition of setting parallel truths.

Torn between my desire and my distaste of human productions, disoriented by the mutant value that I give to them, I look for a reconciliation with my environment. »

Léo Luccinoni uses a global vocabulary as much for delivering a singular look on things as to report on the incongruity of our contemporary society. Paying attention to the real, especially to its underestimated forms, is the assurance of an abundant and unusual vocabulary that he is looking to review and give a different temporary meaning.

The articulation of those new objects, symbols, images, and discourse, is of course made with the intention to tell a parallel story. Léo’s oeuvre is tinted with humor; he diverts the aesthetic of different areas of art. But this attitude is exempt of cynicism: it’s the attitude of a conscience that is detached only in the appearances and for which ferocity is, in fact, the choice of decency. Léo concerns himself with the relations between the production and consumerism in the arts, the industry and broadly human’s activities. The paradox is that he considers art creations as ideas and merchandise that are understood in the context of the consumer society and that are appreciations of it as much as condemnations.

Léo aims to transmit an objective vision of art within his practice. A non-illusionist and non-cynical production, where different references merge in a shifted way. His productions appear as a form of a society that magnifies the object, that keeps us between the claws of its own seduction system. Gathered they seem to be elements of collections of remains of the industrial area, leftovers brand-new and smooth. Léo Luccioni’s reality constructs itself on this loop where what is rejected will keep coming back claiming it’s place, waiting for it’s presence to be felt by one’s conscience and for an intention to be dedicated to it.

Leo Luccioni will be presenting his upcoming solo show at Everyday Gallery on May 2nd, 2020.

Thomas Ballouhey

Thomas Ballhouey (b.1990) is a french object designer/artist who lives and works in Paris, France.

After receiving a bachelor in Product Design at the ESAD of Reims, he graduated from the Contextual Design Master Course of the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2016.

His work process could be summed up by a quest for alternative and experimental means of productions, suited for the articulation of fictional objects. His practice revolves around altering different techniques and materials, implementing them with various scenarios.

The result is displayed in imaginary objects from another place, showing a landscape of ornated sculptures that could have been, imagining unknown artifacts if we had decided to take an unexpected turn at one point or another in time. A landscape strangely similar to ours, or at least strangely similar to our customs.

Ultimately, the works serve as a deforming mirror of our own environment and habits, a production of objects that widens the field of possibilities.

Yoel Pytowski

Yoel Pytowski (b.1986) is an installation artist who lives and works in Brussels.

Yoel grew up in more than five different countries and feels no national link to any of them, his relationship to identity and place is marked by displacements, mobile and blur landmarks, as well as cultural and social contrasts. His childhood and adolescence took place in houses that were under construction, which developed his fascination towards changing structures and space. He attempts to question the paradigms of these themes by exploring the domains of architecture, writing, and drawing.

In his in situ installations, Yoel Pytowski places the space and its questioning as a central narrative element, evoking in the site events of construction, destruction, and reconstruction from the past or the future.

By creating negative space or by introducing new physical elements into its surroundings, his work blurs the conventional perception of the existing space in which these elements — most of them concrete — seem to emerge from, or disappear into, the ground. This interaction forms an ambiguous situation where it’s difficult to discern the artists’ work in a singular way.

Pytowski’s architectural interventions generate an irresolute strangeness that gives a certain porosity to the accommodating space and question it. This creates a distance between the observer and the identity of the space, provoking, in turn, a new way of perceiving the surrounding context.

For Everyday, Yoel installed a footwalk covering the entire first wing of the gallery. A massive catwalk built of wooden panels and concrete. Space is overtaken by a moonlike feeling of excavation finding it’s way around the different other artworks. This showcases Yoel Pytowski’s ability to infuse, with partial moderation, his narrative in every given container.

Valentin Vie Binet

Valentin Vie Binet (b.1996) is a French artist based in Paris.

His practice started at 16 when working as a construction worker, repaving the cobblestone streets with cement. One day, a dog ran through the fresh cement leaving his tracks behind him. As frustrating as this was, the little paw imprints were a creative epiphany for Valentin who had always seen this material for it’s constructive practicality. This is when he decided he had to dedicate his time to the craftsmanship of cement in it’s ambivalence.

For Everyday Gallery, Valentin Vie Binet is displaying a piece from a new series of concrete items that vogue on the romanticized narrative of the baroque salon.

Tumulus, 2020, exhibition view, Everyday Gallery, Antwerp

Softalism – Solo Show by touche-touche

“Underneath the ground, there is bedrock, magma, liquid iron, solid iron. Above the sky, there is mostly nothing, apart from a few hot, lonely stars and planets scattered around in space. One could say that between, beneath and above there is the earth’s surface, your surface, the atmosphere. But from a materialist perspective, it is more accurate to say that between the iron core and the lonely stars there is the synaptic cleft.” — Anna Zett, Artificial Gut Feeling

It’s a room, malleable in every sense. Individual sculptures in space merge into the decor of a bedroom that through two large windows opens itself up to the street. Often hand-carved and manually rubbed in flexible coating, the charge that touch gives us, is formulated in ‘Softalism’. Public interiority. Leaning strongly on hybrid resemblance, every piece—be it a bookshelf or a vase—gets unexpectedly slippery upon closer inspection.

The practice of touche—touche transports the viewer to an empire of dreamlike apparition and tactile explorations. Lacquered wooden tiles, foam rocks; simulated textures toy with bodily perception and reality slowly resides to a secondary position. Manufactured in intricate detail, the artists use contemporary materials and techniques, to create new fiction for daily scenarios. Each imagined scene is a reinterpretation of existing cultural traditions; their environments are a free fall in tangible reality. touche—touche’s sculptures and center-stage bed convey a sensuality—abundantly haptic, otherworldly. Here, the mind is never fully asleep, it is resting on an extended sense of relation. The artificial—the ‘almost’—triggers an internal peaking flip. The scene induces the viewer to the arousal threshold of wakefulness and sleep.

-Céline Mathieu

Softalism, 2020, exhibition view, Everyday Gallery, Antwerp