There is something faintly preposterous about spending an extraordinary amount of time making an image look as though it has always been there. And yet that is precisely what makes Beast’s “Want Justice? Here Justice” so compelling.
Completed in late August 2026 on an abandoned farmhouse outside Reggio Emilia, the work places a roughly 15-by-6-metre Louis-Ferdinand Céline across a building already well into the business of disappearing. From a distance, one might assume the portrait has simply been printed and pasted onto the façade. Up close, the process reveals itself to be rather more obsessive than that.
Beast begins by photographing the wall itself — every crack, stain, abrasion and patch of failing plaster. He then transfers that exact texture digitally onto the portrait before printing the image at monumental scale. The paper is returned to the original building and painstakingly aligned so that the printed fissures meet the real ones underneath. It is, frankly, an almost absurd degree of precision. The effect is marvellous. Céline does not appear to sit on the building so much as to have been lodged somewhere within it, waiting for the surface to wear thin enough for him to come through.
This is part of Beast’s ongoing series “…and we hired a bloke to fix the wall”, developed over the past three years around a wonderfully unfashionable obsession: figures from twentieth-century culture whom contemporary life has, by and large, stopped properly thinking about. Camus, Jung, Roth, Pollock, Chomsky — and now Céline. The pairing is rather elegant. Forgotten or increasingly distant cultural figures placed onto forgotten architecture from more or less the same century. Two forms of memory allowed to deteriorate at roughly the same time.
There is no nostalgia here, which is important. Céline, in particular, would be a ghastly candidate for uncomplicated reverence. His literary importance exists alongside a moral and political history that remains deeply troubling. Beast leaves that contradiction intact. What interests me is the insistence that forgetting is not the same thing as moving forward. London’s contemporary art world can be terribly good at announcing the new before breakfast and forgetting it by supper. Beast’s work feels almost wilfully out of step with that machinery. He keeps returning to people, buildings and ideas that have slipped out of immediate view.
Because one cannot really understand where one is going without some notion of where one has come from. Rather unfashionable, perhaps. Also rather necessary.
Instagram: @beastwalls
