Like a chance meeting of an umbrella.
And a sewing machine in a black Impala.
Mixin' metalflake with a jet propeller.

This monotonous flywheel is the junk of life.
This desire magneto... this is not a pipe.
Prob'bly Picasso painted this pinstripes.

The Cramps, I'm Customized in Flamejob LP, 1994

I'm Customized might not be the best song The Cramps came up with during their tumultuous career, but the words could find a ready fit with Ludovic Paquelier's two-tone wall paintings. And the pull the American garage punk group has for the artist isn't the main reason, either. It's more to do with the idea that when he paints, he's effecting the same kind of displacements the Cramps did, notably in their psychobilly reprise of the famous line by Isidore Ducasse, Count Lautrémont, ¹ that fascinated André Breton, inspired the avant-garde and changed the artistic profile of the twentieth century.

Long the embodiment and representation of modernist beauty, the shockingly unlikely encounter symbolised by that umbrella and that sewing machine together on a dissection table has now become something self-evident – a commonplace. Even so, and fortunately, the impact of the unexpected in collage has not merely been reduced to an advertising monopoly or a postmodernist catchcry. And so a part of the new generation of artists that Contemporary Art sometimes has trouble classifying – even as it manages, more or less, to fit them into its ever more tentacular and extensible circuit – is still heading off down the obscure paths of Maldoror.

Paquelier's pictorial constructions are the outcome of a series of playful inventions and intuitive adaptations fluctuating between black and white, whole and part, model and exhibition venue; the outcome of transformations which, to use a favourite term of Lautréamont's time, could be described as "electrifying". Most of Paquelier's works begin with a process of selection and cutting-out aimed at the preliminary – flexible, adjustable – collage that will progressively lead to the wall painting. The artist works with cut and paste layers and cut and paste tracings – but uses his computer mainly for listening to music. Generally speaking Photoshop remains a peripheral concern, being used only to obtain the initial sample that precedes cutting out by hand. Nonetheless Paquelier is very much an artist of the age of the computer and of the culture of the interface.² Much more than just a striking evocation, Ducasse's phrase can be seen as urging an anthropological practice of which computers, too, are the heirs: take a disparate sample/put every element together on the same plane/stitch together.

Like the Cramps song, Paquelier's black and white compositions mingle terrestrial metals with celestial propellers: not in some black, swift beast of the African plains or our highways,³ but on the vivid whiteness of a wall. His mixed-bag frescoes not only pull in fans of American underground culture and readers of Deleuze and Guattari, who might ultimately project the "white wall/black hole process"⁴ onto them ; they also signal in the direction of our daily lives. We spend a good part of our days and nights both wearing ourselves out and relaxing in front of our computers, which are nothing other than the distant grandsons of the sewing machine and the weaving loom, the latter being the first machine to identify difference: positive and negative, black and white.⁵

Armed with scissors and a camera, Paquelier sorts through the vast stock of miscellaneous images making up his databank, lifting out the ones that suit the work in hand and then taking up his brushes and other painting tools. Designed with their specific venues in mind and effected in situ, his collages first come to light – or rather to darkness – in his studio. We can imagine his dissection table covered with photocopied shots from horror and sci-fi films, weird B-movie stills, photos of the friends he uses as models, pages clipped from magazines, pictures of human limbs, comics, art reproductions, rock portraits, newspaper cuttings and a stack of freshly made Indian ink and pencil drawings – some dashed off, others absolutely meticulous. Put together with historical, political, architectural or purely anecdotal data relating to the planned venue, these personal references allow him to establish a metonymic process and work up an initial visual sequence. These scrupulously prepared collages are then put in place on a detailed maquette before being projected, reworked and painted in black acrylic on the pristine white of the gallery walls. So the maquette is a kind of three-dimensional notebook later subordinated to the experience of the full-scale work. The precision of Paquelier's figurative line is counterpointed by the vigorously polluting abstract marks of the bits and pieces he throws at and drags along the walls: bicycle seats, mops, sticks, etc., all totally ordinary and all soaked in black ink. Out of the tension between figuration and abstraction emerges a kind of automatic writing, a spatial or ontological montage⁶ unleashing outrageous narratives: the cannibal zombies of Subsistanz (2006); the lightning and the electricity pylon under the living-dead gaze of Sharkaman in an outdoors seething with strange insects, in Last Summer (2007); the 1958 Blob openly threatening the Institute of Applied Science campus in Lyon in 2009; Cary Grant replaying that famous scene from North by Northwest in the shadow of a French fort as the couple from The War of the Worlds (1953) look on, in The Killer Storm (2006); and the perspectivist vortex of works of art and explosive imprints around Damien Hirst's pricey, baneful skull in Poltergeist (2009).

Ludovic Paquelier's work could be likened to that of Gérard Gaziorowski, Raymond Petitbon, Henry Darger, Öyvind Fahlström and Jim Shaw. Or of Moebius, Alberto Braccia and Charles Burns. Then again, there are influences to be found in David Lynch, Gerhard Richter and Hasil Adkins. Lines cross, data cross-contaminate, visual fields intermingle. In the world that is ours Paquelier uses montage and the opposite poles of the spectrum of the visible⁷ for creative making-do – and laughter, when possible – amid the incurable indistinction of the new modern times. What he puts together out of his ongoing arrangements is maybe a personal code for making do with the incurable ;⁸ and what could be more incurable than these zombies "re-created" from magazine figures through the use of black ink on glossy paper, in a work which, touch by touch, plays with the already processed and the interchangeable ?