JULES BALLON
31 MAY 2025 - 29 JUNE 2025
ETABLISSEMENT D’EN FACE
Texte français
Violence versus Love. The simplicity of the dichotomy is surprising in the context of contemporary art. But here, it seems different. It is both contrast and twist. It's not the usual hate-love opposition - two antagonistic feelings - but violence-love: an action opposed to a feeling.
Violence may be born of anger or despair, but it carries with it an intention, a will. Love, on the other hand, is first and foremost a feeling. However, with its verb “to love”, it can also become a decision, an active attitude.
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The room is bathed in black and red darkness. In the center, at eye level, an inverted pyramid hangs, its tip pointing towards the floor. Medium-sized, it is spread between the room's four upper corners, held in place by taut cables.
From its base, facing the ceiling, springs a round bar that pierces, much higher up, a black dove, skinny and plucked, its wings spread wide open.
On the mantelpiece, a liquid-filled jar contains a heart-organ and a plastic flower. Glued to the lid with wide black tape, a spotlight illuminates the whole, hemming each petal in scarlet red. Turning towards the exit, we see another door, adorned with green-tinted antique glass.
*
The pyramid reminds me of another Brussels landmark: La Loge, with its Masonic past. It also reminds me of Egypt, and Emmanuel Macron, arms raised in a V-shape in the courtyard of the Louvre. The pyramid as a summit of civilization, an intellectual and political symbol.
But the pyramid, contrary to Masonic tradition, has no omniscient eye. Inverted, it becomes opaque and elusive. The functionality of its base is abolished: it floats, suspended in the air, held in place by four forces that prevent it from crashing down.
I'm tempted to project patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism into these cables in tension - but I'm missing a fourth force. We could slip in a catch-all force, dependent on circumstances and human failings.
The impaled dove reveals the damaging power of this inverted pyramid. But in an earlier exhibition by Jules Ballon, Rue Américaine, even right-side-up, the pyramid already carried death - for little white mice huddled together.
We can't avoid another symbolism, that of the dove, but taxidermy and its black color oddly make the emaciated bird more alive, less abstract. The contents of the jar, on the other hand, with its gelatin heart and plastic flower, have nothing lively about them. But that's probably intentional. Is this what apathy look like?
*
In the accompanying text, of uncertain authorship, two new dichotomies appear: Fear vs. Love, taken from dialogue in the film Donnie Darko, and Oscar Wilde's classification of humanity as Charming vs. Tedious, breaking with the traditional Good vs. Bad opposition.
It's a bit all over the place - quite funny, especially the reference to charlatans: “(ab)using the dialectic as a novelty-sized sledgehammer capable of smashing all contradictions, obliterating all problems”. But the author loses me when he writes that love and violence are terribly similar. The word feminicide comes to mind, along with the worn-out arguments of the so-called crime of passion.
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For Jules Ballon, quoted in the text, “it is not a vision of love or violence or the two together, it is a vision of immanence - the irreducible and infinite becoming of violence, of love, of reality, of fantasy”.
I understand this renunciation of transcendence in favor of immanence, but without the omniscient eye I feel lonely in the darkness and the blood. A bit like the black dove on the exhibition card. A red flower in its beak and a blank, incredulous eye.
Roshan Di Puppo