Mathieu Renard

Who has never dreamed that a hostile, monstrous and undefined presence should come and disturb our daily round? Who, as a child, does not remember having felt a paralyzing anxiety in front of an unknown shadow cast by a piece of furniture in his room? What arises in us when we look at these transformed images is a memory of those childhood fears. Our diffused anxieties as adults are also projected in them. Unless it is a matter of the unconscious, an unmastered mass, with which each one of us, grown-up or child, struggles with? The richness of an image is judged by the diversity of the interpretations which it gives rise to; and these probably also contain their share of mischief and playfulness.
Hijacking images—a process always dear to Mathieu Renard—is an invitation to reread them. Photographs of Stalin’s regime did away with political figures regarded as bothersome; here the process is the reverse, the black shapes invite one another, the better to underscore their fixed, conventional aesthetics, and to make their subject ridiculous and poke fun at it, as in this photographic reproduction depicting the gigantic statue of Kim Il Sung, in front of which a crowd of people respectfully prostrate themselves.