I have a project, Retroactive Interference born of this strange feeling, shared by many of us, of being in a movie. This unique moment that we are living has transformed our vision of the world, or rather has blurred it. Fiction and reality seem to merge to become what you might be called “realiction.” So, I am going back to my roots of my first great artistic traumas. I want to talk about the films that marked me as a child and teenager. It’s not just about masterpieces – some are even proven z-grade series. But these films are at the origin of my universe, of my psyche… Their common denominator? They are genre movies. Horror, violence, action, science fiction, apocalypse… to sum up quickly.My childish spirit still untouched by references, ingested everything with a limitless appetite. Later, of course, I evolved in my tastes, but I never forgot that primitive joy felt in the darkness of a movie theater or in front of an often-viewed videotape.I have kept intact in me the energy of revelation; it serves as fuel for me.

I will make, in my own manner, the posters of the films that have shaped me but also of films invented or dreamed up. I want to confuse reality and fiction.Our daily lives have turned into the extraordinary long before this global pandemic. Whether we take the attacks of September 11, Fukushima, the mass exodus of migrants… Everything is to underline the ambiguity of a world that scripts its own collapse in a mixture of amazement and dread. Drawing, color, catchy phrases, exuberance: that’s what the form is all about. Again, I need the primitive impulse of joyful creation.When I adapted Pinocchio into a comic strip (the first animated film I saw as a kid at the cinema and which traumatized me… once more!), I had in mind to talk about globalization.

If I have hijacked a myth of popular culture, it is to give my vision of an ultra-liberal world adrift. It’s an almost unconscious process that is found throughout my work. I have a rather dark vision of our society and I feel the need to counterbalance it with a playful even grotesque form.Irony and melancholy are very good friends, as we know.The films I am going to illustrate are about a world that is collapsing. Whether it’s an invasion of the living dead, a natural disaster, a nuclear explosion, a pandemic… Yet this story, we already know. This film we have seen before.And these films about ecological disasters, or about the ends of the nuclear world, how many have we seen? Dozens, hundreds… Some will say that reality goes beyond fiction. For my part, I would say that it is fiction that takes the place of reality. The ultra-liberal world predicts its loss constantly and, better yet, seems to want to accelerate it based on previously written scenarios. The prophecy is stated; all that is left to do is to fulfill it as a good student does. Is the World aware of creating its own destruction? Why this relentlessness to produce chaos? One may find an answer in turning 2000 years back. Western culture is rooted in Judeo-Christian ideology. The foundations of the Christian religion are based on the idea of the end of times, of the apocalypse. Jesus said: “the end of times is coming soon, get ready! “

For his third solo show at Galerie Georges- Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Vincent Paronnaud, a.k.a. Winshluss, well known by comic book aficionados for a few cult publications and the prize for best comic book at Angoulême (Pinocchio, 2008), looks at the love-hate ambivalence. This duality is already embodied in a recurrent pattern from his work, which he likes to refer to: Robert Mitchum’s two fists in the film The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton, one bearing the word «Love», the other «Hate». Winshluss usually only represents the «Love» fist in drawings or sculptures, separated from the body, like a mutilation. This time, he offers us both hands, which is probably worse, both 1:1 scale glued on a handrail, in a pale resin, like a 3D ghost, and installed at the height of the viewer’s eyes. These cut fists find an echo
in four paintings representing severed fingers surrounded by insects, perhaps the sign of a sexual frustration if we recall
the Freudian use Buñuel made of hands in An Andalusian Dog… Small phalluses wandering around on their own, but still ready to punch. At times, the only thing left is the shape of the fingers, or the holes in which to squeeze them: like this rumpled beer can, Next, or the American fist also tattooed with «Love» and nicely entitled Dans ta gueule mon amour!. Which shows that emptiness needs filling.

The materials and the manner in which he expresses this ambiguity recall the world of the Mexican calaveras, offerings in the shape of a skull often made out of sugar, a festive vision of the afterlife, and even a fertile one as the calavera is supposed to nourish the deceased. In Winshluss’ works, it is not sugar but ceramic or porcelain, with the same flowers as the ones found in calaveras, but fallen at the feet of the object, forming a kind of crown from which springs the skull or the fist. Variations on the tattoo and «glory» aesthetics. Death, or indeed love, is the great common lot, the vanity. Winshluss sometimes talks about the mediocrity of life: even when we think we have succeeded, we actually have failed, in a way. Perhaps then, this consciousness of failure could be a superior degree of success… In any case, there is always resurrection, redemption, may it be crucified on a piece of wood from Ikea.
It is almost like the triumph of death, if we accept the double meaning of genitive, objective and subjective. Death triumphs, as in The man who killed the sun, cheering fake cinema poster, but it is also a triumph over death: after all, the artist (who has represented himself as a warrior) is stronger than the sun. Once fire has been stolen, he lights it under his diorama’s characters from The Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet, which brings us back to the couple, except that it is a trio: Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband read by René Girard? We are not on the grass, but below it (we can see the roots, not the dandelions), and we are far past lunchtime: the presuppositions implied by Manet are unveiled (prostitution, money) and the woman on the painting, the only one in the exhibition, is armed. She has already sorted
the two men’s cases out. We would readily see in this (semi-)victory the feminist key to the Winshlussian macabre dances.