| FR
Hervé George Ic’s transgressing screen
excerpts from a text by Stéphanie Katz, 2005
collection mes pas à faire au Creux de l’enfer, 2007
(…)
Amongst layers and quotes, on the canvas, mingle the floral sexual metaphors of the Dutch corpus, the putti’s nakedness of Baroque elation, the outdated heroism of naval battles and the morbid bestiality of animal corpses and hunting scenes. Delineating an experimental field, this reference to pictorial tradition appears as the discovery of a no longer imposed but chosen heritage. It also sets light on a land-surveying of the ancestor with whom one has to start a dialogue. Through his layers-quotes, H.G Ic had chosen his selected family, a family of painters, as someone else would have built a survivors’ hut on some deserted island. Despite its frailty, this architecture is indeed an architecture able to answer the silent violence inside an image, no longer defying but identifying. So, if this imaginary selected land is inhabited by flowers and putti, it is also the land of a nameless war. Despite their conventional aspect, naval battles and hunting scenes assign a silent war, a war in lounges or in waiting rooms, a pitiless war, a cruel war far beyond mere disobedience. Inheriting also means assassinating. To be able to look from a safe distance, one has to defy and aim his gun at what is to be seen.
(…)
Pure gallery of floating portraits, a flock of silhouetted teenagers hangs in the middle of a bright and slightly acid scenography. In such an extravagant environment, the sexual differences vanish and a new third sex arises. It is not androgynous though. ‘Fair-haired boy’, ‘drunk’, naked, masked or disguised, the male acquires a feminine fragility. Adorned as a warrior, frontal and impudent, the flirting raver girl is conquering and offensive. Thus, between the young girl and the young boy, confusion turns into the transgressing shape of the transsexual, main figure of this large digital mass. Far from the binary self-sufficiency of the hermaphrodite, the transsexual displays the suffering of the image, its void, its inefficiency and its disparity. In a sheer intimate and social war, without having a proper identity but transfiguring any of them, the transsexual creates a third body, a junction body, a screen body, a bifacial body. Never fulfilled by its double identity, on a daily basis, the transsexual lives and suffers in the flesh the lack of boundary. Actual metaphor of th screen image, it reveals the hurtful, frustrating and atrocious side. As the screen image, the transsexual shows the vacuity of an outside zone. The mere transsexuality of the screen image stands out, vividly stating a model without a referent, a transgressing figure.
(…)