Ces images n’ont rien de réel car, même si leur captation s’effectue dans la réalité la plus tangible, leur contenu, une fois dupliqué, rejoindra automatiquement le territoire des signes. La réalité de leur existence est un peu celle des couleurs qui filtrent à travers les paupières quand on cligne des yeux. Pourtant, aucun hasard n’est à l’origine de ces images. La représentation qu’elles véhiculent ne semble en rien provenir d’une poésie intérieure produite par notre interprétation sensible du monde. Elles existent comme stéréotypes et appartiennent plus au régime socio-économique dont elles sont issues qu’à l’individu qui les génère. Le plan aérien de la ville éclairée dans la nuit, les pétales vaporeux des fleurs, la réflexion d’un coucher de soleil sur l’océan sont autant de signes de la beauté du monde, que d’expansion d’un libéralisme grignotant l’inconscient.

Ces images voyagent ainsi entre deux mondes dont elles constituent les portes de sortie et d’entrée. Elles peuplent la fiction, le spectacle et la publicité comme des extensions du réel qui amène en fait un ancrage tout autre : une situation dans laquelle nous sommes déjà tous d’accord. Elles ne construisent pas la narration. Elles sont son préalable. Comme le bruit de la pluie, elles infusent l’histoire.
Elles la rendent plus confortable. En un sens, elles l’universalisent parfois jusqu’à en perdre le goût, n’en laissant que la texture. Elles convoquent ici des sentiments ambivalents, leur usage répété rassurant le spectateur jusqu’à la nausée. Ces images innombrables, bien qu’à première vue inoffensives, sont finalement incontournables. Elles se laisseront, toutefois, habiter par des directions diverses, des charges sensibles, des humeurs aux tonalités changeantes. Elles pourraient être elles-mêmes des fragments de langage, des ponctuations, des bouts d’une étrange mémoire commune qui laisseront toujours planer, si nous les regardons assez longtemps, l’ombre d’un doute.

Ludovic Sauvage

In Boxes, the image and its interface never dissociates from one another; the image is seen inseparable from its device. The scale of the images and the depth assigned to the modules recall potential objects intended for common use, designed to store both memories and moments. The principle of reality emerges to define the thickness and physical dimension of images which, rather than being integrated into a support, materialize it and become its system of representation, as well as its material, its color, its zones of hollow and absorption. An extension of the image-object.

The displacement of these images inserts them into a floating state, enclosed within the materials that serve to contain the memory, where the deepening of these moments participates in an unsettling insinuation of these images into the recesses of our consciousness. The works in Boxes determine an ambience based on a series of generic micro-events, more or less charged with meaning, which despite their anodyne dimensions can have an impact on a more extended continuum. Undefined moments caught in time, from which it would be possible to extract an experience simply by looking at them. The frontal iconography inserts them into cuts and incomplete fictional potentials where we decide to delve deeper into or remain on the periphery. Images and objects combined, reach a tangible quality, a kind of assumed power of activation that remains at the edge but never becomes effective. Within the generic aspect that detaches these images, it creates distance, while the repetition and signs used seem to shift what might have seemed like a hint of a plot, in an attempt to embody the regulators of an ambience.

Fiona Vilmer

Ludovic Sauvage took as a starting point for these new works a group of appropriated pictures linked to the internet musical wave of slowed and reverb: slowed and dilated tracks amplified through reverb which aim to customize by a melancholic depth or dark tone ultra-mainstream pop songs. This music trend, which massively spread during the lock-down when thousands of teenagers where glued to their screens, witness the possibilities that internet offers to virtual communities for fitting cultural products to a generational psychic zeitgeist. As they can be found on youtube, these remixed tracks are almost always pictured by a two sec looped-clip of a Japanese anime. Below the youtube browser window, whose size served as measuring standard for Sauvage’s pieces, the endless scroll of comments posted by users express the addictive and hypnotic effects of these songs listened in loop to the point to provoke a kind of artificially induce nostalgic trance.

Sauvage has built his own pictures from stills of these animes linked to these “codeinezed” remixs. Decontextualized and even further removed from their narrative origin, the pictures were plotted and merged in pairs to generate a third image, then printed on a pink polystyrene sheet, material used as insulation layer in private residences. Each piece of the series hosts as much as it absorbs one or more of these “double-images”: unclear scenes in close-up framing, where everyday items, sunsets, slightly obsolete technological devices, - button touch 90’s phones, audio-tape players, cathode ray TV. Body parts, - hands, but also feets -, spotted the residual presence of characters, but no frontal viewpoint can assume psychological identification. Suggesting both the idea of off-screen and a fragmented point of view connected to the ghosts of a collective mass-unconscious to which they could integrate.

Sauvage puts the resistance of these pictures into test, pictures that he tells are “orphaned”, “derailled from their narratives”, by re- inscribing them in a new context. He do this by giving them an ambiguous material anchor, at the same time protected and locked down into an optimized space referring the screen display, and updated, immersed into a new syntax that stress their discontinuous, fragmented, fragile aspect. Fade into the porous material of this insulating foam, pictures appear captured on a threshold, both evanescent and opaque, tangible and transparent, as miming the real/fake consistency of a déjà vu.

The two shades of pink used for each piece create the visual effect of a note that concentrates and expands: the volume part of the object is painted on with monochrome pale pink on which shadows are reflected, while the printed part is treated by a dense, purplish pink, reffering the color of “purple lean”, a very popular drug among teenagers composed from codeine cough syrup. Supposed to provide a sense of well-being through the floating of consciousness, this drug is described as an inducer of “a lying feeling”. But, at a time when our memory and affective structures are shaped by artificial implants, formatted by a storytelling which vampirized our “deep” self, the demarcation between the named “true” and «false” feelings seems far from being so clear-cut.

Here, it is not putting up an inventory, a display, or a simple suitable container for images, but creating a unitary object, which complexifies the distinction between image and support. This rather classic pictorial problematic (figure/background, container/content) is, in this work by Sauvage, updated to stress the way we are accustomed to “take” and consume images at the same time as the apparatus that transmits them : the hollow part of the volume that is revealed below the image could refer tho this end the vertical scrolling of the browser windows.

But these modular units can also be seen as ghostly, “soft”, and meta-fictional revivals of minimalist conventions. Here we can consider the “functional confusion” instanced by sculptures such as those of Richard Artschwager, “meta-objects” in trompe-l’oeil that “refute the social utopia conferred on them and the illusion of minimalist purity”. In Permanent Breakup, a new turn could be given to this revival as the starting point here becomes the minimalist object as it was absorbed into the language of domestic design, then diluted into the aesthetics of corporate society before finally returning to the field of art. These multiple back-and-forth contributes to the indeterminate aspect of the pieces that Sauvage has been creating in recent years, objects that are just as much images devices, as scenarios for framing the gaze and the subjectivity (or what remains of it).

As in the slowed and reverb trend, or in a more underground version like the “vapor wave”, the remixing methodologies and recombinations of sounds encounter a contemporary and communal aesthetic of the “liminal” to which Ludovic Sauvage also seeks in his own way to give shape. This aesthetic obsessed by the dry melancholy secreted by halls, corridor, empty shopping malls, and all the sterile containers that capitalism designs for optimized flows, promotes the idea that we could mentally plunge into the surfaces of our hyper-reality to find hidden interstices in which to wander endlessly. The work could even more resonate with the way in which Mark Fisher, in The Weird and the Eary, interprets the contemporary liminal as a reinterpretation of the Freudian unheimlich, associating it with the destabilizing effect that stems from a “failure of presence”.

Now, places or objects designed for the relentless renewal of productivity become new scenes for the appearance of specters. Permanent Breakup gives a certain depth to this failure of presence, shaping a space in which our ghosts of fictions can, anew, be projected and extrolled.

Clara Guislain

At Pauline Perplexe, the shapes that surround us seem to have absorbed an existing vocabulary while their desires have supplanted possible underlying behaviour. Each of them has already been exhibited under a different aspect or in a different context. And if one seeks out the gestures that preceded these adaptations, none of them really dissolve, but rather contain others by way of encasement. In these rhythms effects, these forms seem to have languished in an elastic state where emotions and moods have been negotiated like a raw material.

Thoughts agglomerate and saturate the space. Folded and shaped like pieces from a set, these forms are dissociated. To blur the texture they exude is tantamount to dreaming their own fatigue, or to bring out a malleable material from which a self-reflexive space can operate. In these movements of introspection, questions about the patterns, discourses and powers that act in our relationship to the world stick to the forms, but through stretching, it is also about their own mechanisms that they cogitate. At Pauline Perplexe, they investigate as much a speculation of their image and their materials as what they project of the reality. And somehow this implies an escape, an attitude of extension as a way of shifting.

In Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice (2009) and again in its film adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson (2014), The Golden Fang is so many occurrences or representations that refer to a name: a schooner, a dentist’s office, a cartel, a rehabilitation institute, a (discrete) establishment organisation. Its hazy contours and nebulous system change roles, mirroring the late capitalism that creates needs as much as it fills their lacks.

Fiona Vilmer

To settle in images as in a space from the rear where spectral figures and gestures would outline the possibility of a counter-world. It would be a matter of reversing the space, provoking a vertigo, insinuating the floating of an inverted reality. In fact, space and time cross the image in the work of Ludovic Sauvage and induce the starting point of exploded forms. Daytime TV would be like a plot, made of alcoves hidden under reality ; of absences and presences whose material would have been disseminated here and there. Towards a sensitive and codified space where each surface reflects as much as it absorbs, and where each element replay its own revelation.

A mise en abyme that could be compared here to what some critics have called “metafiction” as a literary genre (1). In its postmodern extension, fiction beyond its strategy of self-reference (2), pastiche and quotations to earlier genres (3) unfolds as a reflector of what shapes our relationship to the world. It thus attempts by the absurdity of its scenario to paradoxically snatch the texture of reality. In the same years 1970-1980, this taste for archetypal appropriation is the trademark of the Pictures Generation artists, one of the critical vectors of which aims to uncover the simulacrum peculiar to the mass media. But it is in the 1990’s that artists will fit into the fictional process to extend it to the exhibition display, thought of as a transitional space (4), suddenly ready to exalt reality. As with literature, fiction as a tool highlights the degrees of maneuver in our relationship to reality. These formal juxtapositions generate a porosity between what is illusory and real, intensify what is outcropping and relay a proximity to the world. But what about a metafiction that goes from the literary genre to concrete forms, applied to the materials of reality?

It is perhaps from this intuition that Ludovic Sauvage conceptualizes over time a practice of installation where images take shape by their deconstruction in the environment. Each gesture empowers them and operates a temporal shift, as they become by turns, moment, object or pure surface. Metafiction is therefore not so much about pastiche but rather to inhabit images. If he extracts a battery of stereotyped patterns, snatched from their context, it is to generate a malleable material and extrapolate them to new situations to expand the atmosphere of a world punctuated by inconsistencies of which each form seems to flirt with reality and give it a closer taste. The gesture thus injects the images with a captivating formal presence of the most elusive, situating them as against time.

Daytime TV, does not escape this process of appropriation where now the simulacrum is stretched to the limit of abstraction. Ludovic Sauvage infiltrates the image except that here he abandons a frontal use of light for a digression through the object. In addition to images, pieces of furniture spread in the exhibition space. Perched on water-repellent wood modules - a distant nod to the original function of les Bains-Douches - surfaces are no longer fixed but transitory shots whose images are incarnated on screen mirrors.

On the ground, printed mirrors could illustrate, in the manner of chapters, domestic manipulations, not without being tinged with a charming strangeness, and which blue velvet touch remains intangible. Inserted on modules, systematically offset from their structures, these works envision an unveiling of the image, such as a concrete shadow drawer revealing a reality sometimes silent, barely concealed. On the wall, cottony spectra nuance and weigh down the atmosphere with purplish mist as a gradation printed on sliding mirrors. Except that here, mirrors are no longer intended to enlarge the space but simulate to scramble it, already in an intermediate stage. Blue surfaces embedded and perforated -recurring motif-tool in the artist’s work - project a missing part, where the image vanished, it only reflects that of the inverted space in which we might abandon ourselves and dive. It’s up to us to let ourselves be sucked in, to settle in the darkness of the off-screen. So that the missing image reappears elsewhere, illuminating another interior, inside of a jacket left hanging.

At Les Bains-Douches, Ludovic Sauvage materializes a perceptive loop that suggests reality as much as it misleads it : a sort of temporal ellipse substituting the linearity of time. Each form is emancipated at the same time as they participate in the exhibition ensemble. The mirrors constantly bring the screen of reality in a mise en abyme, crossing it and surrounding us. If the original meaning of the image is diluted it is in favor of a new receptacle - Eternal loop. From now on incarnated in the mirror, images would make us doubt the objectivity of the latter, no longer intended to reflect what we can not perceive but transfiguring its presence as an instrument of self-discovery (5) over what escapes us.

Fiona Vilmer