The Bigger The Short, The Sweeter The Bottom
18.03—29.05.2022
De Garage/ Museum Hof Van Busleyden Mechelen, Belgium
For his exhibition ‘The bigger the shorts the sweeter the bottom’, second-skin suits are stuffed and dressed up as higher middle-class office workers. These “dolls” line in the space in protest or shame: forming a human wall, held in place in a pillory, or peacefully demonstrating on a truck blasting slogans. As though they were protesting, the dolls hold the middle between being an actual body and a tool for representation. Subtle but flagrant like a dusty scent, his work rubs together different histories: painterly Belgicisms, comics, and politics. In one of his drawings in the exhibition, figures swim in flooded Wallonia; the characters seem animated, under the influence and disconnected at once.
Thoughts on freedom and repression run through the show. Human commodities of profiling, From the way we learn skills to the way we dress, from the partner we choose, to the car we own: the creation of our identity becomes leverage. Like an expensive loafer or a steak-stuffed businessman, we might ask what confining structures do we give shape to for them to shape us in return?
News quotes find their way into titles of works, some of which are made on handmade paper. By recycling old paper, he makes thick pulp and processes it into new sheets that dry on a line like laundry: chewed world news. The paper, undone but still remembering its content, looks like concrete walls in the way it is mounted on canvas in Ludwig’s show. Potatoes, a borrowed Belgicism, fill the exhibition floor. Their stuffy quality nicely aligns with the starchy civilian characters in the space. In a mesh, different sources and types of information and dreams are processed – only seemingly random traces are left. Lutgens' paper processing room nicely alludes to the covering and undressing of uncensored pulp. Vieze mannekes, as his neighbour used to call his childhood drawings, still rule his universe. The men bathing in a flood speak to the puffed people protesting in the flesh.
Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O— vowels
Some day I will open your silent pregnancies:
A, black balt, hairy with bursting flies,
Bumbling and buzzing over stinking cruelties.
This is a poem by Arthur Rimbaud titled Vowels. I found it in Shaking Woman, by Siri Hustvedt and was a bit bummed this too was another white dead man to mention. For me it was the playful, seemingly careless way of throwing up vowels while describing the underbelly of dirt and knotted complexity, that made me want to add this poem. Not for it’s poetic linguistics but for the gestural sway and the unwell underbelly; what my friend Natasja Mabesoone nicely pointed out as an “Urbanus” feeling, excuse the Belgian reference. But then we looked up Arthur Rimbaud, and William sent me an old picture of the old dead historical person we had to admit not having read much from. William plainly wrote “grappig mannetje”; funny little fellow, and the carousel was on again.
Excerpt written by Céline Mathieu
