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Eric Pougeau
Review :
Eric Pougeau Interview
Exhibition : "Ne me cherchez pas je suis mort" April - May 2005
(translated as : "Don't look for me I am dead")
What is the approach in this exhibition, or what is its theme?
In a sense, it is all about morality. For me, morality is by extension the beginning of evil. The minute moral standards are established, evil exists. The correspondence I realised, of children receiving letters from theirs parents, is a work that started from the realisation of our faculty to digest violence. Whether through the media or TV, we look at violence, we look at death, and straight afterwards we go on with our lives. Our propensity to digest violence is incredible.
There is also the notion of the impossible...
Meaning...
For example, the series of little notes addressed to the children are an impossible correspondance, or quasi impossible. Or the Virgin - with a tail- normally a symbol of good on earth, is being eaten away by evil, it is also an impossible figure. I am also intending to create a lightbox which will be called "The Marquis de Sade Hospital", it's an impossible hospital, never will one see a hospital called like that. There will also be a skipping rope, the rope will be made out of barbed wire, and there again is this notion of the impossible.
Your first idea of a title for this exhibition was "Oh the guilt", is guilt also part of your reflexion?
Yes... It's more about my own guilt than that of others, I do not try to convey a message, I even think that art is totally vain, it won't change anything. For me, it's almost made to finish in the cellar, it's being shown here, but three quarters of the time, it's in storage.
Has this guilt got to do with art?
Let's say it's got to do with the definition of the artist. The artist, is a man, who like everybody else is guilty of accepting, and the artist can in his work refuse to accept, but yet, since art is vain and that it is just art, the artist is as guilty as everyone else. But the guilt also springs from the fact of participating in a system that functions on violence.
We are in a system which functions on violence and which shows excess through television, etc. At the same time, this system installs laws, it teases the consumer with violence and gives him only one release : to buy more; whereas violence is forbidden by law in our society.
I think this social interdiction becomes only possible in the private sphere. In privacy, man unleashes himself.
There are a certain number of works that refer to childhood, to family relationships between children and parents, is there a denounciation of a way of upbringing, or of the adult to be?
No, my work is more orientated towards the way in which parents do things without realising their consequences. There is the idea of possession, to impose an adult's viewpoint or way of thinking on children, who in turn, become traumatised as they grow up to become adults. From the parents' notes to their children to the work "Attention enfant méchant" ( "Beware nasty child" ) or to the works on the conjugaisons starting by "I torture" or "I commit suicide", there is a sort of crescendo in violence, or more like a debilitating rise in the degree of violence.
Is La camisole de force or "The straightjacket" a metaphor for the spirit that we try to conform into a mould, that we try to constraint to a way of thinking?
I had not thought about it that way but it's true. The straight jacket reflects the idea of possession, of clamping down on children, it is part of the private sphere of these little things that happen, not necessarily violence in itself but some kind of over load or spillings. Well that's my view point anyway, it comes from what I see in those that surround me, etc.little things, very little things that cause spillings and have led me to do this straightjacket. The straightjacket is quite strange, but it's also because I have had a peculiar childhood.
I have read somewhere the term "ready-made" in an article to describe your works. What is your artistic procedure, how do you create, how does it come together?
It is really a thought condensed in an object. The object materialises the idea. My purpose in the works with writing is to go back to , not to the simplest but let's say to the most basic. I have no artistic training, I do not know how to paint, I use prefabricated things. I use writing to provoke images, to give birth to impossible images.
Do you not also try to express through your works, things that people think to themselves but would never say in public?
No, I am not a denounciator. I just do my work, I'm a perfectly normal guy, it's personal work, of a very personal nature. If it denounces things, it just means that I am a very banal person.
In fact, some people might feel concerned aboutyour works and others might not...
Exactly, there is no educational purpose, it is a question of sensibility.
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| Ne me cherchez pas je suis mort |
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| Hôpital Marquis de Sade |
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| Couronne mortuaire |
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| Corde à sauter |
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| Parfum, "Pour maman" |
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| Camisole pour enfant |
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| Mes chéris |
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| Arbre généalogique de Peter Pan |
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| Vierge |
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