Photo: Nikolas Ernult / Ville de Pessac.
- Humanimal -
This big piece (70x100cm, Posca brushes, watercolour, bronze powder and acrylic coating) was made for a national urban art contest and group show, Les Vibrations Urbaines de Pessac. The theme was "Man VS Wild". I chose to work on the wild and animal side we all have, and how our addictions to information/digital/intellectual activities make it harder and harder to tap in that powerful, most enjoyable and playful resource. The main animal is the pig, because it's the animal that symbolizes enjoying material/flesh/food pleasure the best. Being somewhere between vegetarian and vegan, of course, it also draws a parallel between how society tolerates horrible treatment of animals as long as it's hidden away from the commoner, and how it's normal for a lot of people to put the outcome of that process in their belly, as a form of cognitive dissonance: not seeing the animal inside the human, and the human inside the animal.
The guy on the right, has his "inner red" reaching the eyes and his inner wild bird reaching out past the skin, showing that he's about to realize all that (the lightning above is the sudden understanding). The eyes of the other characters are empty, and there are a few 0s and 1s around their head, as their mind gets sucked up to stuff that is irrelevant at this time. They think everything is fine, though, as the melting gold and fake halo says. The only real eyes are on the keyhole-shaped cameras of the smartphones, trapped into a virtual enhancement of reality, but getting away from it. When I stay behind screens too much, my brain starts to melt down, that's what's happening to the guy on the left.
It was actually the 3rd version of the same concept: the first one below was a first attempt at it, going for stencils, paper cut, spray cans and watercolour for the animals inside.
Below is the 2nd version: I made everything cleaner and bolder, added animal bones on the floor, clouds of mist down to the ground to make the real world becoming harder to discern, turned the watercolour animals into a fittingly digital print, and added the only real animal, a photo of a mantis I took in Japan, trapped in a smartphone. The beer the woman on the right is drinking, making a convenient anaesthetic covering her inner wildness, was made with a glue gun.
When I finished it, it was ok, I was happy mixing so many different techniques into one piece, but what I had in mind, originally, was a more simple, bold and graphic piece, so I made the last one following that lead.
I made an alternative digital version for art prints and goodies:
