Interview with Ludovic Boulard Le Fur

q)Who are you? Where are you from and where do you live now?

a)I’m Ludovic Boulard Le Fur, I’m French, I’m 29 years old, and I’m fond of drawing, chocolate and surfing. I live in the suburb of Paris.

q)What is it that you do? What media do you use?

a)I draw on paper and wood. On paper I use to make frottage from the textures I find around, and I represent a face, a mask,a body, or an imaginary sculpture. On wood, I cut forms, I paint and then draw and I assemble it to make one piece. These two processes are born in my scholarship exchange in Australia 4 years ago.

q)What do you think sets your work apart?

a)I think that my work on paper feed my work on wood and vice-versa.

I like to discover why I did a drawing, a few months or years later…

And I realize also that more I’m going to the abstraction and more I transform it in figurative things.

q)How long have you been showing your work for? Did you have a “big break?”

a)I did quit the art school (Ecole des beaux-arts de Paris) two years ago.

Since that I did 3 solo exhibitions:

The first one I was kindly invited by “Atelier Katalin”. I showed exclusively works on paper. It was very motivating and the beginning of lot of things, particularly a new view on my work.

A few months later, I was lucky to exhibit in “La Maison Rouge” (le vestibule) which is my favourite museum in Paris http://www.lamaisonrouge.org. I was nicely invited by Sophie Gaucher with who I was student in the beaux arts school and she was also working in this museum. Here is her blog http://suivezlaligne.over-blog.com/

And The last one was in a café, invited by Collection Revue http://www.collectionrevue.com/, with whom I gave an interview in their very nice magazine (one book by year about drawing). At this occasion they want me to invite someone to show his work with me, so I invited my brother Jérémy Boulard Le Fur who people knew more for his cartoons (he is an animator film maker) than for his drawings. Here is his blog http://jebou.over-blog.com/

And I regularly show my work in collective exhibitions in Paris.

q)What are some things that have inspired you?

a)I’m inspired by cartoons of my childhood like Ken le survivant, or by toys like Mithy max …

Also comics about super heroes and later by trading cards I still collect. I realized my work on wood tries to be closer to the holographic images on card (you can see hidden parts when you move the card).

And I like a lot of tribal arts which are the very base of the super heroes…

q)What have you been working on recently?

a)I’m working on a piece that I sold. It’s about a sculpture on a wall. My client saw the piece (which was with an ephemeral wall) in an Exhibition (curated by Alexandre Pottier) called “RENCONTRES” http://www.rencontres6b.blogspot.com/ in the 6B http://www.le6b.org/. The client asked me to have the same thing installed in his apartment on his own walls. So the sculpture already exists but I’m working on the wall behind the sculpture, and some wood cut would be also put on the wall like in the exhibition.

q)Do you listen to music while you create your work? If so, would you give some examples?

a)I like to work with sound around me, but never any music. I’m a radio addict. I like hearing people speaking. I listen funny emissions with jokes, fictions, or very serious and complicate ones that I don’t understand, and when I’m lucky I love to hear emission about UFO.

q)Do you do work in any other media? Other projects not necessarily related to your main body of work?

a)I did a short cartoon in loop with Vladimir Manouvia-Kouka (I just did the drawings) http://vimeo.com/11970524 it would certainly be a bigger project later.

And in relation to it, I’m more and more attracted by the light, the sound and projecting colours but I’m not sure about all of that, I just have wishes. And I’m thinking about using real materials stopping drawing textures but having them in real…

Far of it, I’m working on tapestry projects and toys surfboard.

q)What advice do you have for artists looking to show their work?

a)I’m not old and full of experience to be able to do it. And I’m still not living with my art.

I tried at the beginning to directly go to show my book to some galleries I liked. The reaction was very bad, they didn’t understand that an artist come and “sell” his work directly to the galleries. I did it because I wanted to show my work to more people than just my family.

But In Paris, or in France you can’t do that… it’s not the protocol. Well I perhaps saw the wrong ones, I don’t know.

The only times it worked was because a Gallery came to me and not the opposite.

Most of the time, the galleries prefer to “discover” you, visiting another gallery.

So I have not any advice because every one and every place is different. Just perhaps one thing: don’t work only for showing it…which I want to do to myself every time.

q)Do you have any upcoming exhibitions of your work that you can mention?

a)Yeah, I’ve been invited by Romain Trinquand (with who I exhibited in “RENCONTRES” I just mentioned before). Sophie Gaucher, Astrid Méry Sinivassin, Romain Trinquand, and I will show in Anvers (Belgium) in February.

q)Where can people see more of your work on the internet?

a)Right now I put photos of my work on http://flickr.com/loubard/photos

I have to make a new website, but I can’t do it. I have to find the way to do.