Plinth

Many of the works in Dundee Marmalade, a retrospective of work from 2013-24, hold both clear and peripheral objects in contemplation: a shrilling Canada goose with its flesh-pink tongue crashing against the air, three lemons on a white cake stand surrounded by near darkness, a series of hands gesturing in Bacon-esque distorted planes, a swan being throttled, a stack of espresso cups and saucers, a startled white owl against a backdrop of puce green.

The exhibition is organised in three parts. The ground floor consists of a series of newer works, moody, comic, and disturbed. The second stage of the exhibition is a series of scenes from the life of Christ, following on from Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Emil Nolde. But where Nolde’s Christs are near-luminous, Boullet’s Biblical scenes are lurid, their combinations of earthen reds and vomit yellows characterised by a profane expediency.

In the final section in the upper floor of the gallery, large canvases and smaller still lifes sit side by side. The most impressive is a pair of paintings showing mirror figures: a dishevelled one-legged, bald figure bent over, pressing his forehead against a spade. In one painting the man’s mouth is open as he bends to the right, in the other closed and bending left.

Among these experiments in figuration, in a handful of pieces Boullet uses found objects. Several flattened chewing gum packets are stuck aside the artist’s first name scrawled in paint. A celebration of the man who defeated the gum?: VICTOR. In some paintings lists of food objects dwell in the lower corners: ‘MORE CHINESE FOOD TONIGHT / CAN’T WAIT / CHEESE TOASTIE LUNCH.’ Such is this work’s innervated sense of immediacy – fixated on gratification, bodily consumption and organic decay.

Boullet’s career has already had many iterations and locations. One painting reads: ‘MY NAME IS VICTOR I’VE LIVED IN PARIS FOR 7 YEARS AND I DON’T LIKE IT’. It was apparently hung in bistros around the city where the artist worked for several years, before fleeing increased rents to Liverpool.

The artist has worked with performance, video, various publications, and sculptures, often under pseudonyms and with a reputation for being a trickster. He once took the gallerist Damien Airault hostage in an artist’s space in the once lively Marais scene: ‘I want to make him a better person, a better curator,’ the artist said. There is across his work an antagonism with the forms of decorum the art world relies on.

A sense of warning fills Boullet’s work. These images are much more muted than, say, the howls in Francis Bacon’s studies. As well as warnings, jokes also linger inside these works. The painting of the shrill Canada goose is titled ‘With Hoisin’. A swirling pair of still lifes, ‘Pepper Stolen from Jack Potato’, one with green pepper and one with a red pepper, intimate Munch’s ‘The Scream’. But how? When cut open the peppers would reveal their snarling mouths.

There is a curious antagonism in Boullet’s work: neither wholly screaming nor comatose in resignation. Rather, things linger, fester, and take up space. For Boullet, what’s funny about art is not that no one cares. It’s that there’s nothing left to reveal. No one knows what to do with art works, especially when the show’s finished. Painting, for Boullet, is a compulsion taken up in opposition to decay.

What is the feeling of things waiting to be disposed of? That’s a question I imagine Boullet working with. If there is something here that’s rather morbid – like stepping into a hospital waiting room in which someone has just farted – it’s because, like all good comedy, the immediacy in these works attends to simple questions. Not complicated ones.

The historical avant-garde was given the task of saving humanity from itself. Boullet’s work makes nods to these histories of painting, grimacing awkwardly at the bottom of the pile of catastrophes that followed, somewhat indifferent. But not entirely.

What’s next? Do some paintings to pass the time. Cook food for friends. What else? Who knows. Boullet doesn’t claim to. I don’t either. That’s what I love about these works. They’re too canny to be resigned, too aware of the limits that surround them to make grander claims. Yet they remain all the same, stagnant, airless, clogging up the hallways.

By Ed Luker