When I started to study art, I picked madness in art as a first theme to defend. Soon, I was asked to put it off. The subject is too broad and not very rewarding. A week before the exams, someone stole my paintings which finally convinced to bury the idea. Now over thirty, one always aims to catch up with our adolescent passions. Degenerate is therefore a return to my roots and a logical continuation of the previous exhibition. Blackwhite explored portraits whilst Degenerate highlights landscapes. As a graffiti artist, classic themes are a good place for experimentation. First, they reveal the essence of the spray. Then, they allow to compare two worlds to create a third one. Degenerate is about social norms. The selected landscapes are houses and dark winter trees that bring out their own form of intoxicated poetry. Based on sketches. Their subjectivities are pushed to Expressionism. The style refers to the American post-war art movement that projects emotions on a simple landscape, an exaggerated nature on the edge of being abstract. Edward Hopper's loneliness, Charles Burchfield's flower, Van Gogh's sun. A house symbolizing the mental space. Norman Bates' home (Psykoze, Alfred Hitchcock), the Stanley Hotel (The Shining, Stanley Kubrick), and the Paper Street house (Fight Club, David Fincher) are virtually abandoned shelters, solitary and nearly alive. Human mind representations close to their wild instincts, living on the fringes of a stigmatizing society of the strange.
American cinema, especially horror cinema and 'film noir' largely take root in the expressionist cinema of Hollywood's early years. Many renowned directors like Friedrich Murnau and Fritz Lang fled World War II for Europe. They align themselves with the German expressionism film branch. The expressionist painters found themselves exposed by Hitler himself in 1937. This exhibition was untitled «Entartete Kunst» aka The Degenerate Art. It intended to scientifically demonstrate that this artistic movement, among others in modern art, is the result of a degeneration of human beings, a degeneration due to racial diversity and perversion by «Jews and Blacks.» In parallel they displayed art works said to be pure heroic classic art. The correlation between the pieces clearly defines the status quo of the orthodox versus the unorthodox. The modern paintings are suggested to be drawings dreamt up by people in psychiatric hospitals. Ironically at the end of the exhibition, Goebbels (Hitler's right-hand man) and others have included these pieces in their personal collections. In that sense, the authority can make an artist either a genius or an ingenue. On May 7, 2014 was the opening day of Blackwhite exhibition. At the same time in Salzburg the rest of the Degenerate Art collection was found in Cornelius Gurlitt, Hildebrand Gurlitt's son (of a bitch), Hitler's artistic advisor. Mathematically, this leads us to March 27, 2015: as prisons and hospitals tend to disappear to make room for another kind of confinement and stigmatization, especially through the Internet. By wiping out privacy, we accentuate the concept of normality and deaf monitoring. The truth is, it is no longer about monitoring people but making them believe they are being watched. Worried about the opinions of others and to be classified normal, the subject ultimately censors himself. A mind close at hand can no longer be a refuge.