KILLOFER+ – BARRAULT
KILLOFER + RUPPERT & MULLOT
Houille !
Following his late exhibition in Abbaye Sainte Croix museum in Les Sables d’Olonne, and the publication of his new book, Killoffer shows, in gallery Anne Barrault, a series of drawings on paper and on canvas, made in 2011 and 2012. He has wished Ruppert and Mulot to be invited, who will show, for the first time, a film entitled « the Rite of Spring ».
Killoffer suggests the possibility for our digestive and linguistic functions to have the same origin, and emphasizes the skin convulsions that suddenly rise under your affable languor. Often, your hypnotic, baroque, modern style, slowing down movements cause perceptive clutters alike the moonlikeencroachments of certain Parisian streets. Sometimes, carried along, your course gives birth to a flow of constellations on the slanting surface of the paper sheet, ideas that spurt out like intellectual sperm.Here is the beginning of the world, the birth of planets, the aboriginal peoples, the archetypal animal.
There are so many Killoffers in you and around you. Why are there several Killoffers rather than one? Because he investigates how you feel about the Universe, in a way both well behaved and unruly. He has to split up and duplicate himself, to become, in turn, an experimental metaphysician, a patabiologist, or the surveyor of mad science, to tackle all the faces of your perception, not to give it any respite, to seize it when it is mere metamorphosis, when it changes shape. Killoffer calls up all its facets, which then become the adjuncts of his relentless inquiry about you. And if his comic strips are metaphysical and scatological, full of ceaseless questionings like flows of mental diarrhea, Killofer’s images are eschatological and cosmological, softly mineral, alternating shadows and geological forms. They let the original shapes of your fundamentally equivocal affects appear, that no discrimination will ever solve. Everything will always be ambiguous in your life; everything will always be reversible, steady one way and the other, carnivalesque, uncertain. It is unquestionably the victory over the duck rabbit world. Joseph Jastrow was right.
Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot were born the former in 1979, the latter in 1981. They met at a barbecue at Dijon Art College in 1999. The two friends work together drawing as well as writing the scenarios of their comic strips that endeavor to depict absurd situations both funny and strange. Photographers wonder about the origin of the scars on the face of a depressive boomerang champion, black slaves, out of revenge, pat their masters’ cloaks with their penises, enemies fight a duel in the middle of the yearly meeting of sword swallowers… Killoffer introduced Ruppert and Mulot to l’Association , a publishing house, in 2005, and their second book, « Panier de singe », won an award at Angoulême festival in 2007. In 2008, both authors, at the same time as publishing with their publisher, start developing a new kind of comic strips they take out of their usual field: the book. They tell stories through exhibitions of drawings, installations, lectures, living sculptures telling, for example, how an audition goes when actors wearing masks must play the part of a drunkard in a show for Swiss Alcoholics Anonymous.