Bruno Rousseaud, TWENTY OUT OF 20

Ketabi Bourdet presents TWENTY OUT OF 20 by French artist Bruno Rousseaud.

The automotive world and underground culture, constant visual elements in Bruno Rousseaud’s work, have been intertwined for more than twenty years. His exploration of motorsport as a formal system questions the individual’s sensory relationship with this object. The semantic power of each of its components is explored as material for thought. This artistic approach was almost immediately combined with the study of alternative forms of language (sign language, Morse code, Braille, semaphore alphabet, or cuneiform writing), transposed through visual, tactile, olfactory, and/or sonic means.

The MANTRAS and SEVEN WEEKS TO GET UP series were the first experiments in writing in Braille on materials such as faux leather and rubber. In 2017, at the invitation of an international symposium devoted to Transmission, Bruno Rousseaud erected five monumental sculptures within the Sorbonne University. Riveted in negative, a Braille phrase is reproduced on the four racing tyres that make up each column. This device materialises the adhesion of the metal piece to the rubber as the vehicle passes over the asphalt, while also suggesting the imprint to come (“TRANSMISSIONS”), the unsettling back-and-forth of that which impacts, transforms, and transmits.

While Braille is used throughout the project for its aesthetic interest, its formal richness, and its semantic potential, the multiple methods used to materialise it—riveting, perforation, projection, reflection—alter and complicate its apprehension. Rather than employing it within a defined formal universe, this troubled and singular approach becomes, through the materials and techniques used in its execution, a means of creating illusions, revealing fragments of lived experience, contradictory emotions, partial desires, and fleeting victories.

The twenty tyre columns, shaped like Egyptian volumens, silent sentinels of an almost embodied message, enter into a silent dialogue with a series of twenty photographic compositions. Each is intrinsically linked to an iconic title by a 1980s musical group (DOUBTS EVEN HERE, New Order, 1981 / BURNING FROM THE INSIDE, Bauhaus, 1983 / PULL UP THE ROOTS, Talking Heads, 1983...).