Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fool
On William Ludwig Lutgens’ A Comedy of Humours
2020

Extract out of text by Michaël Van Remoortere

We live in hysterical times. Even when the world came to a screeching halt and the apocalypse did not announce itself with “lightning and thunder” or “archangel trumpets”, but through the silence of empty streets and lives treamed funerals, we were flooded with interpretations, opinions, soundbites, convoluted powerpoints and, as if things were not bad enough already, a newly invigorated moralism disguised in the prêt-à-porter rags of Art. It was supposed to be a time of introspection but when the smog had cleared, we discovered there was no revolution in the air and yet we called our despair hope to mask our powerlessness. But amidst this turmoil of timeliness, we seemed to have forgotten this most untimely of all human endeavors; laughter...

...Using the formalistic conventions of an ironic heritage, he nevertheless attains the expression of something sincere. Like the philosophical idiot who did his utmost best to unlearn all the fallacies he was acquitted with since birth and now only knows he knows nothing, the artist made the world into his own theatre wherein he can stump around like a bull in a china shop with the grace of a prima ballerina. Forcing a pathway to possible exits by presenting us with the alloy of his observations, imagination and scattershot references. Not merely asking questions, which seems to be the hype in contemporary art nowadays, he is unraveling the framework wherein these questions originate. The image deconstructed by the story of its creation. Alternating between the power and impotence of the theatrical madness at the end of the world as we know it William Ludwig Lutgens presents with his Comedy of Humours the dysfunctional family of man.