“Want Justice? Here Justice” is the latest and largest-scale intervention to date from Beast’s ongoing series “…and we hired a bloke to fix the wall”, a body of work developed over the past three years around memory, history and the physical traces of time embedded in abandoned architecture. The series places portraits of figures from literature, philosophy, art, psychology and cultural history onto damaged and neglected buildings. Carl Gustav Jung, Philip Roth, Jackson Pollock, Albert Camus and Noam Chomsky are among the subjects who have appeared in previous works. These are not intended as monuments or conventional celebratory portraits. The figures are treated instead as presences emerging from places already marked by time, neglect and disappearance. The building is never simply a backdrop. Its surface becomes part of the image itself.
The wall comes first.
Each work begins by photographing the actual wall on which the piece will eventually be installed. Its cracks, stains, erosion, discolouration and imperfections are then digitally transferred onto the portrait of the chosen subject. The resulting image is printed on paper at scale and returned to the same wall. During installation, the printed surface is positioned so that its cracks, damage and irregularities correspond as closely as possible with those of the architecture beneath it. The intention is not to cover the wall but to disappear into it. Image and architecture merge until the subject appears to emerge from within the building itself, carrying the same scars and material history as the surface it occupies.
For “Want Justice? Here Justice”, that process was taken to a scale of approximately 15 metres high by 6 metres wide, transforming the side of an abandoned, partially collapsed farmhouse in the countryside near Reggio Emilia into a monumental portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
Céline was a doctor, a wounded soldier, a magnificent writer, a misanthrope, a coward, a visionary and, occasionally, an absolutely impossible rotter. He spent his life among the sick, the poor, the frightened and the damned, then somehow dragged all their voices into literature with him. He wrote as people breathe, swear, stumble, laugh at funerals and carry on when carrying on no longer makes much sense. There is plenty in Céline that cannot, and should not, be defended. But very little in twentieth-century literature can simply pretend he never happened.
Maurice Nadeau wrote: “What Joyce did for the English language, what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale.”
Five years ago I found this abandoned, half-collapsed building out in the countryside near Reggio Emilia and started thinking about putting Céline there. Eventually that meant paper, liquid adhesive, weeds, heat, dust, silence and a platform lifting me roughly fifteen metres into the air. There were moments up there when dedicating a fifteen-metre wall to a dead French lunatic suddenly seemed a slightly questionable use of adult life. No heroics involved: Céline wrote Voyage au bout de la nuit. I merely got sunburnt, filthy and found myself quite reasonably asking what the fuck I was doing in a field in Emilia.
But the temporary nature of the work is also part of it. The paper will deteriorate. The portrait will fade. The wall will continue to crack. The building itself may eventually disappear. That is precisely the point. The series does not attempt to repair decay or conceal it. Its title, “…and we hired a bloke to fix the wall”, is deliberately misleading: nothing is actually fixed. Cracks, erosion and damage are preserved and made visible, treated as carriers of memory rather than defects to be removed.
The series was presented in Beast’s solo exhibition “…and we hired a bloke to fix the wall” at ELEMENTS Contemporary Art Space, London, from 13 to 21 March 2026, before returning to the abandoned buildings and public spaces from which it originated.
“Want Justice? Here Justice” pushes that research to its most monumental scale so far. This paste-up will fade, the building may disappear, and before long almost nobody will remember that I was ever up there. Which, thinking about it, feels entirely appropriate. The books will remain. The rest of us are just passing through.
“Notre vie est un voyage. Dans l’Hiver et dans la Nuit. Nous cherchons notre passage, dans le Ciel où rien ne luit.”
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“Want Justice? Here Justice” starring French novelist, polemicist, and physician Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) | Reggio Emilia, Italy | August 2026.
