Annie Hémond Hotte

Panic myth
03.09–04.15.2017
Room 1

Annie Hémond Hotte’s exhibiton title, Panic Myth, perfectly embodies her paintings’ subject matter. These contain narratives that depict supernatural beings with features that represent a certain idealisation of identity and individuality through the combination of several archetypes or models. The myth in question takes shape through a collection of characters made up from a series of codes linked to painting, society and current events. Each painting is a reference to our era’s deepening fears (the rise of the right, the loss of women’s rights, fear of the Other, etc.). For example, The War of the Gods/La guerre des capitaux draws a parallel between the perpetuity of religious wars (to this day) and the fact that money is the world’s main driving force. It implies that the true motivation behind these moral conflicts is a thirst for gold – and oil – that overshadows human rights in countless ways. In this same line of thought, The Lunatic Astronaut shows a figure attempting to escape his daily reality by moving to a better place: another planet.

The works also evoke the question of what painting represents in 2017. What subjects should be addressed? Which references should be made? How should one approach a medium that so firmly persists through the digital and Internet age? These questions are at the core of Annie Hémond Hotte’s work. Her method involves collecting symbols that reinforce a clichéd view of painting, which she then uses as part of a vast catalogue of reproducible signs.  The artist homes in on what characterizes a pictorial movement (constructivism/Bauhaus, Modernism and Expressionism, with a touch of irony) not to criticize them, but to extract their most emblematic elements. In some of her paintings, the characters have their own identity and represent actual events or phenomenon that relate to the history of painting. For example, Shaman Selfie, Les constructivistes is as much a nod to the selfie craze as it is a quest for the most representative motif of the constructivist movement.

Hémond Hotte describes her image-based work as slapstick-ism, in the sense that it represents situations in a humorous and exaggerated manner, both in her choice of subjects and in her painting technique. Her sometimes – or quasi – cartoonish style gives her paintings a grotesque quality. With Choosing Heads/La table des decisions, the artist questions how identity is constructed through the use of avatars, a current phenomenon in the world of social networks. She also turns her attention to the recent and highly divisive American election, which has left the world in a state of anxiety over what’s to come. For example, how can individuals behave or understand their rights when they must contend with political decisions that go against their own values? If the artist seeks to question the role of painting today, it seems clear that the medium is still quite capable of expressing what preoccupies such a large part of society today.

– Manon Tourigny (translated by Jo-Anne Balcaen)