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Welcome to Erik Stouff Ludvigsens web gallery
Under is a text with links to the gallery. The text develops a part of my research.
click at image to enter gallery
Development
My work started in Norway, where i began with the web installations. The installations are inspired by a
myth, present in the greco-roman mythologie and also in the Norwegian mythologie.
The myth says there are three godesses. The first spinns the threads, the second streches them out in space, and the third cuts them. Every thread is a soul and when a thread is cut, one person dies.
Installation, realised by Thomas Renaud, Delphine Binet and Erik Stouff Ludvigsen under the roof in the art museum of Nantes.
The idea is to materialze a fragment of this space.
Later in the Norwegian mythologie, some of the threads (those not kept by the godesses) transformes to butterflies. The three godesses, sisters of Odin, lives in a deep cave, under the tree of life named “Yggdrasil”. The butterflies seek the light to get out of the cave.
"Le pappilon et la lumière"
The thinkers who makes concepts and artists, have often used the myths to give a image to their thoughts. For example, “the myth of Sisyphe,” from Albert Camus, “The Oedipus complexe” from Freud. Nietzsche said “ The labyrinth man seeks his Ariane”. Cocteau and the myth of Orpheus, “Malpertuis” from Orson Welles, “Saturn devoring his children” from Goya, “The birth of Venus” from Raphaël. De Chirico with his “pictura métaphysique”, will bring his attention to the interpretation of the païen myths.
The myths are anchored in our culture. Theese images takes new meanings and changes with time. It is for example very easy to draw the line between the web installations and internett.
Autoportrait
Because what I do starts with me, it seems natural to make it a part of my work.
I realised a serie called “autoportrait w mirror”.
Autoportrait makes me think about:
The crossings between, capting reality and fiction (mise en scène).
The I reflected, and the I projected.
A narcissistic research. The fixative of a proof from your own seduction.
This work of constance helps you to wake up the unconscient. In the unconscience you can find details, which reveal phantasmes. “The phantasmes engender the culture by force” Nietzsche.
The mask
The mask who reveals a hidden person, the mask that mystifies and shows the presense of divinities, the mask that exorsizes, the mask which makes beautiful, invincible and mystique, the mask which comes to life with the bearer, which dies to be reborn. To loose the mask, loose skin, to moult.
The artists who preoccupied me in this period were Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Cindy Sherman and Picasso through the book of André Malraux “La tête d’obsidienne”. I made the serie “imprint of the imprint”. The imprint of the light with the photo and the imprint of the volume with the plaster cast. The person casted tries to congeal to get the best possible imprint. A tension apears, fragility is installed.
Long portraits
With the diaphragme open for one minute thirty, it is difficult for the model, not to move. The movement will appear. The subjects becoming objects, fixing their eyes in the mirror while the image is beeing taken (1min. 30 sek.). This act can create a tension (like if an invisible thread is being stretshed from their eyes to hold on a lead).
Candels are used for the lights, to amplify the vibrations in the mouvements, and underlign the tension that I seek. This tension is for me what Roland Barthes named punctum in his book “La chambre clair” (puntum like a roll of dice).
In general the mask is beeing used in specific situations, but this specific situation makes the mask. I would even say a moult of light.
This serie of photos is also a wink to the start of portrait photography. The first portraits were made with very long poses (because of the sensibility of the film). Special chairs with neck holders were made, so that people would not move.
I also think about Man Ray who photographied the duchesse. The photo was blurred so he thought it was a failure. The duchesse insisted in seeing the photography, and when she saw it she was astonished. She said “ You have photographied my soul”.
“The synthese of the expression, obtained by the long pose of the model, says Orlik of the ancient photography, is the principal reason for these results, in spite of their simplicity, produces a more penetrating and long lasting effect, than more recent photographies, in the same level like good painted or drawn portraits.” It is the procedure itself that makes the model live, not outside, but in the moment: during the picture making, the model could establish in the image – in the absolute contrast to the apparitions manifested in instant photography. “Petite histoire de la photographie” from Walter Benjamin.
Notes from Rencontres International de la Photographie, Arles (1996)
« REELS, FICTIONS, VIRTUEL » edition, ACTES SUD
Written by Christopher Meatyard about the work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
“All photography unites the nature under a discrete and differenciated appearance. Like the mask makes a reference to the body as a whole, from the stratification of the body in sparkling layers off appearance. We could say that the mask is a metaphor and, in its evolution from a ability to a content, it is the symbol itself of photography
The drawings
After having read the chapter about surrealism, in the book “Le photographique” from Rosalind Krauss, I understood that my drawings was of a photographic class.
At the theatre, in the darkness, I draw the persons on stage. I don’t see what I draw so I act like some kind of sismograph. The surrealists made “automatic drawings” (André Masson) and automatic writing (Breton). The image which emerges. “The image that was latent”.
After this I select the drawings (where I can feel one kind of presence). I scan the papers and work on the new form of the paper that I reflect, almost like in a kaleidoscope.
These drawings are for me like a presence that leaves an imprint and leaves. Like a cell that keeps the trace of a penetration.
To know and flavour has the same etymologie in Latin.
I think it is important, for artists, to create one kind of web, which can connect information from different domains (science, philosphy, and politiques) and stretch the threads between knowledge. Flexible threads, almost invisible that meets without following only one direction horizontally or vertically, but that can adapt to space, mouvement and time.
Theese threads will be a flexical base, which needs to be renewed all the time. New threads are added to be able to see new perspectives. A method is needed to circulate in the peripherie and then come back to the center while making connections.
We must be able to rise our perspective, to see the landscape from high up, to be able to have a vision of the whole, and open the view to new perspectives.
Erik S. L.
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