Vases beaten with baseball bats, axes, or crowbars, or even disembowelled and hung on butcher's hooks; mutilated busts; ornaments torn off and thrown in piles: the art objects in the Abuse series seem to have suffered the rage of a hateful mob of iconoclasts who would reproach them for belonging to the culture of the elite. However, these violent gestures do not result in the destruction of the objects. Rather, they demonstrate their resilience – in every sense of the word – and are reborn in new and surreal forms, which generate emotional reactions mixing the tragic with the comic.
At first glance, the vases of the Subversion series seem quite normal. A distracted eye sees nothing more than one of those inoffensive decorative objects which abound in museums, and which adorn aristocratic residences. However, the scenes and motifs which decorate these vases take the opposite view of the decorations which are traditionally associated with them: hysterical self-representations replace the wise portraits of aristocrats, the entrance to the Auschwitz camp replaces the traditional castle view, the imperial bees change into macabre flies, thus inoculating strangeness and morbidity within the object. This tactic of diverting the subject of motives allows me to address universal subjects, such as social inequalities and their corollaries, wars and riots, tragic migratory phenomena, or even environmental damage. Tragic subjects for classic supports.