http://www.fusil.biz

fusil is an online work based on the guns my son Balthazar made when he was four years old. He created these substitutes for pistols and rifles because he wanted to have guns like his friends in the La Paillade neighborhood.

This primarily poetic work is incidentally a nod to, and a critique of, online arms sales. It also plays on the ambiguity between artwork and weapon, between art trafficking and arms trafficking. Fusil is an exhibition of dart-like objects, art objects: guns.

This work draws its main inspiration from childhood imagination. Each rifle found or invented is photographed against a background: initially paper, then wood, fabric, cardboard, concrete, asphalt, leather, marble, etc. Sometimes the rifles are photographed where they were found, in situ on earth, grass, pebbles, sand, or, conversely, extracted and placed in a different context. The support, the background, plays on sensuality: materials to be seen, but above all to be physically experienced

The support resurfaces with the bark of the tree becoming camouflage. Finally, the highlight of the work, the ultimate weapon: the invisible rifle on a red background.

A burnt pistol lies amid the ashes, representing passion leading to destruction. Another black, charred pistol, on the other hand, lies on black leather, expressing the same idea with even greater darkness. The work raises questions that go deeper than mere play. Why do boys and men love weapons? Is it inevitable? Are weapons images, substitutes, extensions of the male sex? Is the desire for weapons innate or acquired? By placing these works on silk, on sensitive materials (grass, skin, earth, leather…), seduction and sensuality are made tangible. The relationship between soft and hard, feminine and masculine.

Fusil is set against a red background expressing passionate love. Are children’s innocent games a foreshadowing of the games of love and war? Happy angel games become dangerous games. Passions can lead to death.