Ludovic Sauvage — Late Show

Sun, waves, light, flowers.
Night falls over the city.

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.

Ludovic Sauvage

Ludovic Sauvage was born in 1985 in Aix-en-Provence. He lives and works in Paris and is a graduate of the Villa Arson, Nice, and the Beaux-Arts de Valence. In addition to numerous exhibitions in France and abroad, in 2012 he was selected for the Salon de Montrouge and invited to take up a residency at the HEC contemporary art space in 2014. In 2015, he presented his first solo exhibitions Terrasse at Glassbox, Paris, and Le soleil se meut toujours at the Parc Floral de Paris. In 2017, Ludovic Sauvage was selected to take part in the 67^th Jeune Création programme. In 2021, he took part in the Photo Festival Incadaqués, invited by the MEP. In 2023, he took part in several group exhibitions: Plein Feux at the Centre d’art La Chapelle de Clairefontaine, Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines, Slackers at the Tonus in Paris, and Paroi at Doc in Paris. He also presented his solo exhibition Boxes at the Mármol project, Porto. Ludovic Sauvage is represented by Galerie Valeria Cetraro.