Winshluss — Interférence rétroactive — Galerie G-P & N Vallois — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 11 → October 31, 2020

I have a project, Retroactive Interference born of this strange feeling, shared by many of us, of being in a movie. This unique moment that we are living has transformed our vision of the world, or rather has blurred it. Fiction and reality seem to merge to become what you might be called “realiction.”

So, I am going back to my roots of my first great artistic traumas. I want to talk about the films that marked me as a child and teenager. It’s not just about masterpieces — some are even proven z-grade series. But these films are at the origin of my universe, of my psyche… Their common denominator? They are genre movies. Horror, violence, action, science fiction, apocalypse… to sum up quickly.

My childish spirit still untouched by references, ingested everything with a limitless appetite. Later, of course, I evolved in my tastes, but I never forgot that primitive joy felt in the darkness of a movie theater or in front of an often-viewed videotape. I have kept intact in me the energy of revelation; it serves as fuel for me.

I will make, in my own manner, the posters of the films that have shaped me but also of films invented or dreamed up. I want to confuse reality and fiction.

Our daily lives have turned into the extraordinary long before this global pandemic. Whether we take the attacks of September 11, Fukushima, the mass exodus of migrants… Everything is to underline the ambiguity of a world that scripts its own collapse in a mixture of amazement and dread.

Drawing, color, catchy phrases, exuberance: that’s what the form is all about. Again, I need the primitive impulse of joyful creation.

When I adapted Pinocchio into a comic strip (the first animated film I saw as a kid at the cinema and which traumatized me… once more!), I had in mind to talk about globalization.

If I have hijacked a myth of popular culture, it is to give my vision of an ultraliberal world adrift. It’s an almost unconscious process that is found throughout my work. I have a rather dark vision of our society and I feel the need to counterbalance it with a playful even grotesque form.

Irony and melancholy are very good friends, as we know. The films I am going to illustrate are about a world that is collapsing. Whether it’s an invasion of the living dead, a natural disaster, a nuclear explosion, a pandemic… Yet this story, we already know. This film we have seen before. And these films about ecological disasters, or about the ends of the nuclear world, how many have we seen? Dozens, hundreds… Some will say that reality goes beyond fiction.

For my part, I would say that it is fiction that takes the place of reality. The ultra-liberal world predicts its loss constantly and, better yet, seems to want to accelerate it based on previously written scenarios. The prophecy is stated; all that is left to do is to fulfill it as a good student does. Is the World aware of creating its own destruction? Why this relentlessness to produce chaos? One may find an answer in turning 2000 years back. Western culture is rooted in Judeo-Christian ideology. The foundations of the Christian religion are based on the idea of the end of times, of the apocalypse. Jesus said: “the end of times is coming soon, get ready!”