THROUGH SUPER HEROES ET AUTRES MENSONGES

ÉRIC LADOUCEUR

THROUGH SUPER HEROES ET AUTRES MENSONGES

Bienvenue au Balthazareum
  • Exhibition
© Éric Ladouceur, Galerie B-312, exhibition "Through Super Heroes et autres mensonges", 2000.

Éric Ladouceur's work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Montreal (Maison de la culture du Plateau Mont-Royal, 1997) as well as at 10 Ontario Street West, space 500, in 1993, where he presented Tableaux confluents. He has also participated in group exhibitions, including La Biennale du dessin, de l'estampe et du papier- matière du Québec (Alma, 1997) and took part in La relève fait sa cour (Galerie Graff, 1996) and En quête d'histoires (Galerie Graff, 1995), both curated by Julie Turcotte.

12 February 2000 to 11 March 2000

In the mass culture from which Éric Ladouceur draws, we find, among other things, two series of images presented back to back. The most visible one takes us back to portions of our childhood, looking for a wide range of superhero figures in the comic strip. The second series, somewhat hidden by the first, is marked by this restriction which affects the images intended for the so-called "adult" public. The artist takes an ironic look in which power phantasm and sexual phantasm, at the same time, reflect the social barrier between adulthood and childhood. The social criticism of her work points to the alienating power used by the entertainment industry. It would be difficult not to see a moral dimension to it, insofar as these images that address the social and individual imagination seem to exist from two moral discourses whose coherence is not always questioned. While the first is based on a certain myth of justice that is somewhat simplistic and that helps to shape the child's imagination, the other defends the free circulation of pornographic images in the name of freedom of expression, which means more profit than freedom. These two discourses and their by-products are presented as two narrow doors that mass culture offers to escape the grip of reality. It is to this type of reflection that Éric Ladouceur invites us.