How would you define your work in three words?

Phantasmagorical, Mystic and Symbolic.

What medium do you mainly work with and why?

Oil on aluminium because its smooth and reflective surface not only working as a background but also as a reflective space allowing both me and the viewer to contemplate the hostile network of symbols that is the unconscious.

‘ANTS IN TEXAS’

In this painting I seek out to explores the similarities between artists and hoarders. I became interested in hoarders and how by speaking with hoarders more often than not you get a sense of their collection being an extension of themselves much like an artist talking about their work. Hoarding however is often seen as a very materialistic almost unholy endeavour whereas art is regularly perceived as the opposite. I wrote a short story about the matter:

‘Swarms of us break out if food is left around. The apartment is on the first floor, the weather stifling. He lives alone and hardly goes out. For ages he destroyed us, as everyone does, then one day he stopped and watched our colony for hours. Once he squished one of us by accident and he took to sleeping in weird, suspended positions, making nets that let him walk above the floor, muttering to himself about collecting parts of a reality that was beyond him. We chanted terrible prayers that blurred into his emptiness, because all of us are one and he who is not poor in money is poor in spirit as he lacks something more precious than gold — there are those that lack the delicate essential — maybe that’s what he was searching for inside us. Then one day he was taken away and we became no more than a memory.’

Take us through your working process.

Can you remember the first work of art that you created? What was it and why was it so memorable?

The first work I remember creating was at six years old, it was a sketch of some ants I had done while in Texas and I specified the location they were drawn in by writing “Ants in Texas” next to it. I recently did a painting touching on the parallels between hoarders and artists and became inspired by the drawing I did as a kid while working on it, by the end I had also given the painting the same name.

‘GODLAND’

I made and showcased this painting alongside ANTS IN TEXAS and WAS I ALIVE THEN? While the other works in the set exist as scenes populated by a wide range of figures undergoing different but equally strange forms of treatment, the final work presents itself as something closer to a landscape. In some sense, it could be taken that the process of dissolution has finished, taking all the visions in the previous works and melding into a sea of white which then buries the horses, creatures of motion, immortalised in a moment of reflection, returning back to the beginning through a memory. This is a poem I wrote about the painting.

What does it mean to you to win the 2024 ACS x City & Guilds of London Art School Undergraduate Prize? How do you intend to use the prize money? How will that help you as an artist?

I intend to use the prize money for materials that help continue and further my work. Materials I have used already and have become a regular part of my practice and new materials for new endeavours.

‘TRIAGE’

A common hallucination I had during seizures and medical withdrawal was shadows moving with a will of their own. My thoughts at the time were more connected to my shadow, my imaginary being, than they were to my actual self as I was constantly in between a deep unconscious and a reality I was pretty unaware of. I became comfortable moving from one space to the next, walking through the looking glass to the Russian nesting doll of hallucinations, one layer of which included the shadows. At this time my memory was like a wet log that lay in a corner of a fireplace, neither burnt nor untouched, suffocating from the smoke. All I still have from this time is from my unconscious understanding of the weird space around me.

What do you have coming up over the next year?

Now that I have graduated I am excited to pursue art outside an institutionalised setting. I am trying to find ways to continue working like joining studio waiting lists and artist residencies, in the meantime I am working from my room. I also have a few collaborative projects lined up for the future, that involve sculpture and film.

WAS I ALIVE THEN?

Passing through beyond the initial stage of death, the unconscious takes distorted aspects of our material lives and pulls them in a long line, presenting our passage as a surreal carnival of worldly attachments. The boundaries enjoyed by the material world start to dissolve under the weight of the experience, suggestions of how objects and people stand apart give way to another form of understanding. Through depicting the River Styx, I draw upon the possibilities presented by taking liquid as fundamental to existence over a more conventional ontology represented by objects with clean and separate identities. In the process of death, this blurring of the line is inevitable – a change of states, from solid to liquid or from separate to whole.

To view more works by Louis Petit, visit his Instagram here.