Exhibition view, Galerie Lacerte, Montreal

King Lear

This series of paintings represents mises-en-scènes and characters of the play King Lear by Shakespeare, but all the characters are represented naked. In this tragedy, King Lear gradually loses contact with his subjects while the characters around him are confronted to their narcissistic obsessions.

This play enables me to present a confrontation between the individual conscience, exemplified by the different characters, and a more present, post-modern and cut-up vision of the individual. The king becomes the symbol of a pride that precipitates the fall of despots. And this, while they cling to their powers and riches without assuming the reponsabilities of the powerful to their subjects.

This series followes a series titled Public Spaces (image 9), where characters are represented in silhouettes and put in relation to a public space. The terms public space refer to philosopher Jürgen Habermas as he investigates the developing of a space where the ideas and the aspirations of individuals and collectives appear and take consistency in front of others, then enter in synergy or conflict. This public space, Jürgen Habermas sees it appearing in Europe in the 18th century with the press and the edition. The “places” represented in these public spaces are now private, organized and monitored spaces where counterculture does not have a say : a form of contradiction between the origins of this “public space” and its actual form.