Pouliot, Yannick

Whether in my sculptures or stencil drawings, the generic idea of tension, of confusion, between the body and the object manifests itself through the use of multiple strategies. A reorganization of elements and intrinsic distortions endow the furniture with a strange and grotesque aesthetic, defined by its unnatural assemblage and sense of deformity. Mythological by extension, the grotesque coupling is not that of a union between species, but the effect of levelling the shadows where the bodies and the inanimate merge. The optical assemblage defines the subject’s morbid emotional attachment to the object, and, paradoxically, brings the latter to life through vampirization. This element in the erotic corpus follows the sophisticated use of black on white forms in the silhouettes popular in the private salons of the 18th and 19th centuries, before the advent of widespread photography.