Since 2021, Angélique Aubrit and Ludovic Beillard have been engaged in a collaborative practice of sculptures,

installations, videos and drawings. In this work, their own stories mingle with the staging of characters in

videos and performances, taken from intimate situations charged with psychodrama, before reverting to

inanimate dolls in the form of sculptures, encapsulating these stories. Hands, heads and feet carved in wood

resemble oversized helmets, isolating voices and gestures rendered blind under features only hollowed out,

akin to representations of death masks. Costumes of puffy satin and velvet dress these life-size dolls, which

are manipulated from the inside with constraint, weighing down movements.Faceless doppelgangers whose

characters and attitudes are easy to identify with.

In these reconstructions, scenes from lives on the verge of autofiction are celebrated at their most tragic and

comic, but also at their most confused, nebulous and tender, addressing an emotional situation in which

the dolls tirelessly fail to communicate. The grotesqueness of their appearance serves as much to relate the

slow boiling over of the experience of disappointment, as to play down certain traumas. In Je n’entends plus

aucune voix (2021), two characters separate against a backdrop of yellowed wallpaper, and indulge in the

infinite human comedy, first as a video (Résidence Lindre-Basse - Centre d’art contemporain - la synagogue

de Delme, 2021), then as a performance (CAPC, 2022). The re-enactment and its various contexts accentuate

the ambiguity between dead objects and living characters, between subject and object, between the limits

of realistic duration and the expanses of fictional space, which now seems to exist as much as real space.

The scale of the set, the characters and their relationship to otherness play on a reality itself distorted by

experience, so much so that it’s initially difficult to determine whether these are animated dolls installed in

miniaturized interiors or costumes worn by performers, activated in human-sized models.

Break-ups, couples, the difficulty of being in a group, the crushing relationship with otherness, the violence

of friendships, or the compromises and reconciliations that hold a story together, maintain the eternal

loop of deflagration between self and others. Angélique Aubrit and Ludovic Beillard welcome us into these

uncomfortable states, where the visitor, caught up in the environments, scrutinizes the ambivalent psychology

of each of the dolls, which could be us. In Avec inquiétude mais aussi avec espoir (2021), a kraft paper house

on the scale of the site abolishes the fourth wall, and brings the viewer into the group by integrating him into

a family scene and its possible malaise, without really having been invited. This is their home, but it’s also ours.

The verisimilitude of these situations, the hope of the waiting rooms of affect, the absence of a clear script,

the tedium of human baseness, are fixed in the reduced palettes of action of each character, put in loops.

An effective platitude that lengthens the experienced duration of reality as much as it opens up its abysses.

In Gris Clair (2022), two characters argue on a bed filmed in close-up sequence. The viewer, voyeur of the

subjects’ emotional meanderings, witnesses a heavy atmosphere. The slowness that settles into the image is

reminiscent of the cinema of Chantal Akerman or Belà Tarr, somewhere between documentary and the fiction

of observed reality.

Existing as both costumes and sculptures, dolls are seen as transitional objects, porous interfaces to emotional

gaps. They embody dissociated figures, enabling us to project ourselves into the forms of «collective

repression». In Je veux que tu meures (2022), characters from different eras rub shoulders in the setting of

a spaceship. Relationships become cluttered, where an unavowable feeling courts the desire to put an end

to domination, manipulation or the erasure of the other. Within these theatrical narratives, the characters

develop a fiction of trauma, from which a possible consolation emerges in the geometry of relationships. The

dolls crush as much as they take comfort in the complexity of otherness. Everything unravels, each character

traverses the fiction, drifting, like a stoned self with neurotic states that swell and threaten, again, literally tofall

as they move perilously through the scenery.

Just as the stories fall into each other, it’s a film that never ends.

Fiona Vilmer

Selected solo exhibitions: Centre d’art Les Capucins, Embrun (2023), Kunstverein, Bielefeld (2023), La Centrale, Brussels (2023), Galerie Valeria Cetraro, Paris (2022), Centre d’art La Tôlerie, Clermont-Ferrand (2021), Résidence Lindre-Basse at CAC – center d’art La synagogue, Delme (2021), Établissement d’en face, Brussels (2021), Komplot, Brussels (2019).

Selected group exhibitions: Haus Mödrath, Kerpen (2024), Clages Gallery, Cologne (2023), K21 Düsseldorf (2023), Kunstverein, Bielefeld (2022), Centre Pompidou-Metz (2022), CRAC – Le 19 Montbeliar (2022), Bassin Caresse, Brest (2022), Waldburger Wouters Gallery, Brussels (2022), CAPC Bordeaux (2021), Établissement d’en face, Brussels (2021), FUTURA, Prague (2020).

In 2022, the artist duo received the Prix Médiatine, Brussels. Recent residencies include Triangle – Astérides, Marseille (2023), Centre d’art les Capucins, Embrun (2023 and 2022), Centre Pompidou Metz (2022). In 2023, their works joined the CNAP Centre National des Arts Plastiques collection.