Texts

Exposum II explores the margins where life persists despite everything. Figures inspired by Narcissus lean toward murky surfaces—cracked asphalt, saturated humus, contaminated waters. What they seek is not their reflection but a proximity to what endures at ground level, in the interstices of the administered world.

There, in these zones, the plants that agrologistics relegates to the status of pests proliferate: dandelions, echinacea, wasteland grasses. These second-order species persist where the logic of control has failed or surrendered. To grant them pictorial attention constitutes a practice of care—a form of gaze that refuses the hierarchy between living beings deemed worthy or unworthy of regard.

This attention passes through the material itself. The juxtaposition and layering of strata—crepuscular grounds, mineral textures, eroded surfaces — conjure urban, peri-urban, and natural environments that contamination has rendered indistinct. Human figures and plants share the same condition: that of spectral bodies, exposed, permeated by the toxicities of our era. Hartmut Rosa defines resonance as a mode of relating to the world opposed to alienation. These paintings attempt to restore this capacity for listening between living beings, against the systemic deafness of techno-solutionist regimes.

The sick body is not a metaphor for our world in crisis; it is its most intimate symptom, the terrain where the extractivist logics of the Capitalocene inscribe themselves in flesh. Exposum I positions illness as a critical prism, probing what Susan Sontag called the night-side of life, where the logics of alienation and control of late modernity are experienced.

The figures appear as spectres—liminal presences oscillating between visible and invisible, embodied and dissolved. Arranged sometimes on metal tables, sometimes on the floor, they are confined to the inside. These enclosed interiors convey an alienated flesh, subjected to the accelerated tempo of our modern societies. Neon lights manifest as entities that delineate bodies, fragmenting them, thus materializing the cyborg condition in which medical devices reconfigure porous and interdependent flesh.

The canvases establish a duality where the organic and the technical coexist.

The interplay between materials—translucent, stratified, impastoed—and painted devices blurs the notion of the real, maintaining the works in a zone of indeterminacy. Here, the condition of illness becomes the symptom of a vaster pathology: that of a spore-like intoxication of the living by the very structures that administer it.

When words no longer suffice to express pain, and medicine withdraws upon reaching its limits, can painting take over as a communicative medium? Art might give shape to the unspeakable, making the invisible visible. Artistic creation rooted in suffering, often arising from it, provides therapeutic or at least cathartic relief, while opening a critical reflection on the human condition. Illness is a maze of uncertainty. Representing illness—and especially representing one's own illness—could it not be a means to manage this uncertainty?

Ludovic Fleury places the body at the center of his constantly evolving artistic process. Demonstrating complete autonomy and remarkable mastery of his craft, Fleury creates everything himself: stretchers, canvases, artisanal primers, even preparing his own pigments. For Trouble de la chair, Ludovic Fleury produced a new series of oil paintings informed by four years of research into chronic illness, meticulously exploring the body and its representation. Striking a perfect balance between brutality and poetry, Fleury transforms physiological elements into pictorial motifs.

Among the research interests central to Fleury’s practice is the phenomenology of illness. In philosophy, phenomenology centers experience above all else. In medical terms, it defines chronic illness not merely as a medical condition, but as a lived experience. This perspective on illness reveals how bodies interact with their environment, their identity, and surrounding power structures.

The chronically ill individual constantly navigates between self and world. Fleury’s installation L’autre contrée depicts these liminal, ambiguous spaces—psychological or physical—using medical gauze, known for its stretchable and translucent qualities. The motif of the curtain symbolizes the boundary between states of health and illness within medical spaces. Phenomenology precisely softens this boundary between self and other, patient and caregiver, by emphasizing lived experience. The longstanding medical tradition of dismissing patients' voices, long criticized by activist doctors like France’s Martin Winckler, could finally be undermined.

Fleury captures this intimate, indescribable bodily experience through sensuous textural work that blends flat expanses, drips, and washes. The resulting interplay of light evokes the stretched, cyclical perception of time intrinsic to the experience of illness: his canvases conjure blurred, indeterminate space-times, potentially timeless for anyone. Sometimes within a single canvas, or even a single body, diluted paint areas allow light to emerge from beneath, juxtaposed with areas that are more opaque, troubled, or dark. Ludovic Fleury thus creates artworks that can be challenging to interpret. Borders blur more than ever between visible and invisible, control and chaos, echoing how illness confounds distinctions between comfort and discomfort.

The phenomenology of illness anchors experience in the present and gestures toward the future, opening possibilities to appreciate life, to taste experiences beyond illness’s discontinuous space-time of loss. Perhaps this explains the seemingly contradictory lightness found in part of Fleury's work: some paintings stand out through their luminosity and clarity. In Aponia, the subject’s face—far less distorted than in other portraits—appears serene, an impression reinforced by the work’s title. Likewise, the body is notably transparent—during illness, it was more opaque. Yet, this levity remains ambiguous: if not explicitly intended by the artist, the setting—this time a natural rather than medical space—can evoke either relief or burial. Could the protagonist be peacefully freed from pain forever?

This constant double-reading, along with the figures’ discomfort portrayed by Ludovic Fleury, may unsettle viewers confronted by scenes we normally prefer to avoid. Ultimately, perhaps it is our own able-bodied perceptions and cultural norms that need questioning. Couldn't we imagine the protagonist of Cry of the Flesh rising rather than succumbing to pain? This is not about denying chronic sufferers’ profound pain, but rather highlighting painting as the artist’s pathway to self-discovery. A beautiful tribute to the body’s remarkable capacity.

— Balqis Tandjaoui

Défaits approaches illness as the symptom of a dysbiosis between humans, micro-organisms and technical devices. Here, the living is overexposed; organic matter and the synthetic interpenetrate.

The bodies that emerge from the pictorial surface appear fragmented, partial, revealing the faults and vulnerabilities of a whole marked by failure. Through solarisation effects, the void and the clinical glare of hospital neon lights are summoned. This luminous tension acts as a laying bare: it exposes what the social gaze tends to conceal. Painting then becomes a space of extreme exposure, where the biological and the digital intertwine, turning figures into laboratory artefacts.

By revealing these bodies in crisis, Défaits opens a field of reflection on the systemic fragilities and interconnections that redefine our relationship to the living. The project does not represent illness; it materialises its alienation — that of a flesh traversed by technology and micro-organisms.