Biography
Ludovic Duprez
Ludovic Duprez is a French artist who lives and works in Portugal. He grew up on the Normandy coast, at the edge of shoreline and bocage, and developed early on a relationship to the living world that escapes romantic contemplation and becomes matter for thought. Trained in Industrial Design, Applied Mechanics and then Fine Arts, he acquired a double grammar — that of the engineer and that of the painter — which he never stops making converse. Two nomadic decades between London, New York, Paris and Berlin followed, moving through construction trades and visual arts without ever settling, accumulating through practice a heterogeneous formal vocabulary that would infuse all of his later work.
On the work
Making with the World
Terrestrial-extra rather than Extra-terrestrial, uprooted.
These Ecohabitats stage a human activity diminished in its domination and augmented in its attention: one that protects, maintains, cohabits.
Reuse as an inspiring creative gesture.
Many elements are salvaged, recombined, diverted. This bricolage is a philosophical proposition: the idea that a desirable future is also recomposed from the ruins and the objects already here.
An iconography that leaves behind the traditional figures of the hero.
Neither the triumph of techno-solutionism nor a naïve idealisation of nature: these drawings renounce the grand narrative of progress as well as that of catastrophe. Faithful to the philosophy of the Organism, they work with the situation and its actors, human and non-human.
The rigour of detail as an ethic.
The precision of the line is not a virtuoso exercise, but the expression of an attention paid to each element of the living and the built. The conviction that no habitable future is thought globally and from afar, but always at the level of the details one respects.
