Victor Boullet “Werkk.Werkk.Liverpool.Painting.”

LUBOV

[Image: Victor Boullet "Binman" (2020-2021) Oil on linen. 63 x 51 in.]

This event has ended.

Organized by Reilly Davidson

I’m not leaning in any other direction but my very own pit of sorrow and existential crawl.

Victor the grouch. He resents his neighbors for their neglected waste bins.
Victor the sequestered. In seven years he received four visits from friends.
Victor the enlightened. Approximately six thousand encounters with the Liverpool Cathedral, along Hope street.
Victor the in-betweener. Norwegian, French, Scottish, none “major enough.”
Victor the obsessive. He is meticulous and well-studied. In his compositions residues of history dance alongside his lived experience. He plods forth with an Ensorian grit adapted for the new age.

Victor’s compositions are the accumulations of every single moment in his life, everything he has seen spurs paint on canvas. Victor’s productions are not for anything, they are just happening. This quick, revolving door of images correlates to the experience of walking and capturing snapshots between blinks. As he walks, he carries the world in his mind. Notably, this space of transit is one where mistakes and failures can be reflected upon.

You walk your way into thought. You walk your way into action. It is everywhere.

I was in high school when these paintings were inaugurated. There are decades between Victor and I, this stretch of time between 2014 and 2021 was incongruous between the two of us. I was coming of age and Victor was dealing with the austerity of midlife.

It was only at the tail end of his Liverpool years that I made initial contact. I look out and see thirty years ahead of me, grasp it, bring it closer to my purview. Death anxiety happens when I realize that I’ve likely reached my quarter life…

It began with phone calls and over the next few years we exchanged packages and email, sacrificied cellular data for intercontinental telecommunications.

I am getting older, but instead of trying to hide the fact or buy a pair of fucking converse, and as mentioned earlier, I have always said, if I get to 75 years everything above and beyond 75 years are bonus years. i.e. I have another 23 years left (if lucky) please don’t read this as, ahhh, sad, blah blah, no, I insist, please read and understand this as material or content, So how will I, and, or can I use these 23 years of life before the bonus kicks in.

Paris 2009. Victor set forth on a two year expedition: developing The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, a collaborative project operating under the auspices of a faux organization, so that its participants could gain access to spaces that they may otherwise be rejected from. This effort expired in 2011, by Victor’s design. He wove himself into the fabric of the art world only to set fire to that which he labored to create, casting himself into no man’s land.

A self-made exile condemned to alienation. In the passageway between Great Cities he landed in the modest Liverpool, which became his home for the next seven years. His practice took an sinsiter turn inward. Gone were the days of the jester, Victor was resigned to a solitude of his own design. He made an effort to disconnect completely after decades of participation in the European scenes.

These works weren’t made to be shown, and in their exposure they participate and bear witness to a new form of network. A dialogue in private made public, exposure of the intimate. Sustained by their non-strategy. He came to find that envy is fruitless after a dance in the art world’s networked rat race. People became devices for career enhancement. Victor is living in London now, where he is forced back into a circle – by proximity and desire.

I’m dealing with time, trend and understanding, making up one’s mind too quick or by others. Being convinced for the wrong reasons if you like.

At the exhibition’s three-quarter mark, the paintings will be replaced by Victor’s drawings. These are the most elemental form of expression for the painter, the thinnest membrane between thought and composition. These are, simultaneously, building blocks and the structure itself.

I see age as [a] rare type of material or content. The drawings are a matter of fact way of seeing and searching in this material, I guess.

Victor preys upon the mundane and the tumultuous at once, stroking his innermost joys and despairs.

It’s the simplicity of both the emotional and the complex, by just representing the very little you have. Becoming one with what your brain can manage to send to your hand, and accepting the result whatever it may be and no compromise of time or place. The work is yours.
—Reilly Davidson, January 2023.