Boxes

Short moments seem to be on a loop. The iconography focuses on alternating motifs and everyday gestures: a cup of coffee, the moon, hands performing insignificant actions. In these scenes, the iconic dimension of the details leaves the narrative off-screen, and tends less to associate them with a precise memory than with a feeling of collective loneliness.

In the series Permanent Breakup, Ludovic Sauvage samples images from the short Japanese anime loops that illustrate the remixes of slowed & reverb pop songs upload on Youtube. These everyday details combine with the nostalgic tone and recreated illusionary depth of these songs. These images are screened, superimposed and printed in the original format of the viewing frame on pink polystyrene foam in purplish tones evoking codeine syrup, used as a drug for its relaxing effects, inducing a sense of distancing.

The Small Rain series is based on the same image typology borrowed from wider Internet sources, seemingly constituting an intrinsic language, at once personal and universal. These images exist in a myriad of sizes, yet Ludovic Sauvage chooses two of them, keeping their native state, reproduced in two-color process and screened, printed on wood, this time defining the dimension of the piece they encapsulate. The images no longer overlap, but appear in the process of being de-interlaced, in a hazy state where the narrative is not given, between an encounter and a split, on the threshold of movement, recalling the idea of sequence as much in objects as in still images.

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.