Late Show by Ludovic Sauvage at MEP

The Studio, a space dedicated to emerging art, will be presenting Late Show by French artist Ludovic Sauvage.

Overview

On the edge of a liminal space-time, visitors will discover images in which poetry and science fiction coexist. By working with projected images, Sauvage questions our relationship with representation, space, and time.

This succinct inventory could literally describe Late Show, a video installation featuring a succession of cutaways and ambient images with familiar connotations. Conceived in the form of a trailer, Ludovic Sauvage gives these images a strong fictional quality by placing them at the core of the narrative. Evoking the clichés of the natural world (sun, flowers, sea) and those of the urban environment (office buildings, traffic circulation), by combining these short videos Sauvage generates a narrative charged with tension. As the artist says of his images: ‘They travel between two worlds, for which they are the exits and entrances. They draw on fiction, entertainment, and advertising as extensions of reality, which in fact provides a completely different anchor: a situation in which we all already agree. They are not the narrative. They are its introduction.’

Late Show evokes a catastrophe, although it is unclear whether we are witnessing its beginnings or its culmination. In making this film, Sauvage was inspired by a certain type of dystopian cinema produced on the fringes of New Hollywood, such as Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977) and Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth (1985). This video is based on analogue images that were then digitised and processed by artificial intelligence software to endow them with movement. Accompanied by a soundtrack that interweaves concrete sounds and synthetic composition with New Age overtones, Late Show can be read as a self-fulfilling prophecy that draws on the capacity of science fiction to fashion ever more strangely familiar alternatives.