About

Heir to the painters of flesh, Ludovic Fleury roots his practice in a dark ecology and a brutal poetics of care. His starting point is the experience of companion illness, the kind that does not go away. He holds it as a critical prism for contemporary tensions. The body keeps the sum of its exposures: the exposome of a pharmacological society in which what nourishes and heals also poisons. What the body absorbs becomes matter. Vulnerability and duality are, for him, lived realities that he transmutes into pictorial language.

With Trouble de la chair (2024) and then Exposum I and II (2025–26), he asserts an aesthetic of presence, favouring sensation over figuration. His painting, layered with translucent washes, retractions and burns, unfolds zones where the figure bends, fragments, then resists. Inside and outside interlock, sometimes separate, sometimes merged, in a liminal space-time. Metal tables, medical-industrial apparatus and neon lights cut through these places without ever fully closing them. His palette draws on the dystopian imagination of our time: chemical violets, nocturnal blues, burnt-earth browns, the sulphurous yellows of burning skies.

More recently, his work has descended to ground level, where one breathes low, alongside the humus and the plants of the margins. Among others, he paints thistles, wild chicory and poppies, plants that industrial agriculture deems harmful but which still break through toxin-saturated soils. Earth, ash and plants gathered in the field mix with the oil. The figures lean toward asphalt and contaminated waters. Close to crip ecology, which reads in vulnerable bodies the first signs of a toxic landscape, his painting turns fragility into knowledge. Without promising convalescence, Ludovic Fleury paints from what fails, the body under medical control as much as the gesture given over to accident, and makes of this fault line a mode of subsistence.