Discover the contemporary work of Ludovic Bourgeois
Ludovic Bourgeois is a French artist born in Paris in 1969.
Working with photography, film, video installations and different media such as textiles and more recently wood and ceramics.
He lives and works in France.
After training as a practicing photographer at the Ecole Supérieure de Photographie de Toulouse, l’Etpa, Ludovic Bourgeois left his adopted city for Paris in 1993 where he worked as an assistant to photographers, notably Ludovic Carème, his partner at art school, or Jean-Christian Bourcart, Denis Darzaq. He will stay there until 2010.
Very influenced by the American underground culture of the 60s and 70s, he will explore and experiment during this Parisian period with several artistic mediums, broadcasting his work in different underground places and squats of the time, using different pseudonyms to perform. With the arrival in France of the English Free Party scene, he will project part of his work in the form of vjing, mainly "Something special for you - Generation X" autobiographical photographic series on this announced end of the century and also the film "end of the century" montage of archive images and video feedback of several hours. In 1995, after seeing this series in progress, the visual artist, videographer and designer, Pierre Huygues, asked him to be director of photography of his first feature film "Remake". First cinematographic experience where amateurism requested for the aesthetics of this project, makes him approach another way of working, more instinctive, more accidental, which he will keep thereafter.
Meetings and collaborations thus mark his career and nourish his artistic explorations. Jacques Monory will leave his aesthetic mark, another important meeting for him, that of writing with the playwright and director Eugène Durif. In 2007 the latter gave him carte blanche to create the scenography of his play "A même la peau" directed by Karelle Prugnaud, will be followed by a collaboration on "The Seated Woman Who Looks Around", as an actor and visual artist.
He will remain 17 years in Paris during which, in parallel with his photographic and artistic activities, he will also evolve in the world of fashion, the press, theater and cinema. In 2008, his daughter Lou was born, and he left Paris for good the following year to settle in an old train station at the foot of Sancerre.
In 2012, he delved even deeper into the field of interiority, questioning memory, a theme that can be found present in all his work. He created the series “Journal d’une illusion” around his family history and his childhood. He continued and supported his introspective and contemplative approach with the series “Balance”, less narrative, more abstract, the beginnings of the Arboraisth”sis project, “ Anxiogène" series where he begins to approach the notion of ecology and more generally for him, of survival. Lately, he returns to an aestheticism that he had experimented in the 90s. With the Eros series he sequences a strange novel, a mirage of reality, a vertigo of an instant, a memory gone by. Work on the imprint, bodily memory, influence.
As for the project « Arbôraistêsis» started in 2014, it is an open parenthesis in his work, he questions cognition, representations, the imaginary, the senses, the living, our reptilian memory... The main actors being trees, water, atmosphere, earth, stone, the planet itself.
A polymorphic and reflective visual artist, Ludovic Bourgeois does not limit his field of vision and does not want to be subject to any "marketed" identity. He photographs instinctively and manipulates various media working with silver images as well as digital, textile, scraping, painting, collage, video installation. The tool is a means and not an end, a term of a visual language that serves him to probe, translate spaces, times, materials, a singular and significant all or nothing, in situ and in movement.
"A photographer of existence, Ludovic Bourgeois has been exploring, documenting, portraying and measuring the world around him for over 30 years. Born in Paris in 1969, he lives and works in France. His autobiographical story merges with his aesthetic research. The artist navigates in a society adrift and fixes his own landmarks in the film. His sharp gaze pierces the surface of the subject to extract its meaning, allegory, and underlying meaning. Behind the lens, the photographer projects his questions, his fantasies, his illusions and disillusionments. He is not a passive witness of the scene he immortalizes. His shots are moments of life captured on the fly. Photography is nervous, intuitive and deeply alive. The atmosphere, the tensions, the fragility of the moment, the artist makes us feel all the ambivalence of the themes he addresses. Margins, artificial paradises (Generation X), drives, sexuality, identity, gender, roots (Memories, Journal of an Illusion), metaphysics (Arbôraistêsis's project), class relations (Emmaüs), his spectrum is broad and goes against our standardized society. He draws his influences from the counterculture movements of the 60s/70s and in particular the American underground. His experience of alternative circles is decisive in his intellectual/artistic journey and his quest for emancipation. Ludovic Bourgeois goes beyond the frame, mixes mediums and crosses several artistic languages. His plasticity is biting. Silver and digital photography, videos, installations, films, question a universe of remarkable complexity. His point of view oscillates between micro and macrocosm, introspection and contemplation. The artist seeks balance, point and counterpoint, the image and its mental projection. Actor, director, visual artist, his sensitivity is plural and expresses itself with fluidity. Ludovic Bourgeois creates as he exists. His art does not follow a linear trajectory, it takes detours, sometimes gets lost to better find itself. An inner journey that takes us away in a heartbeat."
Andréas Alberti.
