Kevin Rouillard

Sad entropy

Just as he shapes a wall inside a display case—red bricks here and there replaced by small marbled cardboard pieces mimicking stone—Kevin Rouillard builds his work as a pile of assembled parts, a collection of elements from his immediate environment.
Fragments of marble sculpture, carefully ordered gemstones, cemented animal skeletons, a rusted bicycle buried, reminiscences of prehistoric tools… In this excavation field—samples of creation whose value or antiquity cannot be estimated—emerge much more mundane objects, no less bearers of a singular history.
It is through a fascination for their materiality that the artist makes his choice: current or past, inert or alive, the elements are arranged in a play of equivalence. An indefatigable collector, he gathers, piece by piece, the objects that cross his creation, presents them, arranges them, and sometimes—if he cannot possess them—creates them. He thus enjoys reinterpreting his view of the artist who “combines the scholar and the handyman,” and who “with artisanal means, (…) crafts a material object that is at the same time an object of knowledge” (Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage).
Just as taxonomy assumes the function of naming, the artist’s practice aims to organize, to give things a new life far from their original status and origins.
Through various exhibition typologies, the artist shifts from the collection, canceling the desire to assign value to things. Each presentation module, each display case, each pedestal, shouts its strategy of diversion to the attentive viewer. Late descendants of a bygone era, these museum presentation devices transpose these objects, witnesses to an archaeology linked to the present, into the nostalgia of an illusory past, a mythology in the making, a distant echo of Hubert Robert’s imaginary views.

If Broodthaers became in 1968 the Director of the “Department of Eagles,” a fictitious modern art museum, Kevin Rouillard, although not a true archaeologist, becomes the reporter of his own creation. Through a reverse process—which, from the contemporary and current practices, dives to the very roots of creation—the artist manages to bring forth images thought of as “primitive.”
The totem of the Broken Ear from Tintin, carved from memory in a piece of wood and then photographed life-size, replays the tradition of wood carving and engages in dialogue with the world of comic books. While the artist reworks Tintin album panels, keeping only the background, offering them to the imagination as unknown lands, his work becomes a stage on which the most jubilant images and narratives project themselves.
It is up to the viewer to uncover the clues, to rearrange the modules and objects like the panels of a visual story, a comic book at human scale, constantly renewed.

Text by Raphaëlle Romain

Kevin Rouillard’s work is on display during the exhibitions A couteaux tirés, 2015, and Aperçu avant impression, 2015.