"I don't know anything about soccer. I understand nothing about it. I'm swept up in the turmoil of the stadium, of the game, in the memory of gestures, in the chants of my neighbors, in the explosions of emotion."
Louis Verret's practice is multidisciplinary and variable, currently combining watercolor painting, writing and installation. His latest project, Les fruits de la passion (2021-...), explores the experience of drama and spectacle in soccer, in immersive installations that combine textile printing and watercolor painting.
The use of watercolor paint reflects a desire to counterpoint the subtext. Originally practiced for the fugitive nature of travel painting, on the motif and objective, it retains the fleeting characteristics of notes taken on the spot, as close as possible to emotions and stigmata. The book is thus consecrated for its form (on which the memory of the living, its poetic disposition, rests), not for its function (of reading, of culture).
The footballer, absolutely overcome by emotion, fixed in expectation, is part of the pictorial (and anachronistic) tradition of Renaissance feminine and/or divine figures: Botticelli's fluid Nymphs carried by the wind (Spring, etc.).
Male bodies, beaded with sweat, with emaciated features, tears in their eyes or in full fury, borrowing their poses from the history of painting (questioning the memory of a formal pathos), for an atmosphere if not homo-erotic, at least dripping with emotion. Variations via enlargement, prints on textiles that rise and superimpose, play on this confusion.