Happy To Hear You’re Doing Fine

04.03—30.04.2023
Solo exhibition at Kunstencentrum 38CC, Delft, The Netherlands

To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting.

(Olivia Laing, Everybody: A Book about Freedom)

In the first room, they sit on chairs, five of them, as if in a waiting room, waiting to hear their name called out loud. Or to be named in the first place. Their work-appropriate clothing is soaked in layers of oil paint, forming a membrane of sticky, painterly substance.

In the room that follows, they hang on walls among paintings of various sizes, like surrogates for their two-dimensional counterparts. Yellow, the colour of madness, returns in each one of their eyes.

The eye registers a human shape in the peripheral field, and almost by reflex, the head moves laterally to allow the figure to enter the centre of the gaze. Essentially, we do function as mirrors for each other, don’t we? Gazing at bodies with projection beams, speaking at them with the words addressed to one’s self. The puppet bodies are waiting to be endowed with meaning, offering themselves as therapeutic tools in hopes of becoming, like Pinocchio, a ‘real boy’ along the way.

A white-walled exhibition space is designed to appear neutral, stripping the displayed object of context. Perhaps it echoes a pursuit of purity of experience, although a commercial function is equally implicit. The white space is never neutral, the experience it induces is bound to a particular tradition and motivation. The puppets are hung as paintings to be seen as paintings on a white wall, to be subjected to the conditions and assumptions the white wall offers, inclusive of the implied potential to function as objects of economic exchange. In this regard, the artist winks at the notion of zombie figuration – a style defined specifically in relation to the art market trends in recent years. William Ludwig Lutgens creates, quite literally, figurative painting zombies, simultaneously embracing and challenging the notion that has been used as a critique of the stagnant status quo in painting.

Happy to hear you’re doing fine is a phrase that the artist has borrowed from a film by Roy Andersson, whose characters repeat it in several scenes during conversations over the phone. Asides from the dark humour, there is a sense of individual isolation in those scenes, as well as a particular relationship to language, which corresponds to that of the characters in the works of William Ludwig Lutgens. Moving between drawing, painting, and sculpture, the work of Lutgens is consistently in internal dissonance with the tradition and the conditions it exists in, gaining a symptom-like quality through the implicit return of the repressed.