Barbaro after the hunt

Barbaro after the Hunt is a video installation composed of three screens mounted on steel structures with bronze feet. It is inspired by the eponymous work of Rosa Bonheur, a nineteenth-century animal painter, in which the melancholic gaze of a hunting dog unsettles the traditional image of the predator. Conceived as a moving triptych, the installation creates a frontal and immediate connection with passersby. It builds on the imaginary of the hunting dog, a loyal animal, instrument of domination, masculinist totem, to generate a tension between an assumed instinct for predation and the possibility of a shared vulnerability. Filmed in Ille-et-Vilaine in an isolated kennel, a pack of predators stands at attention, waiting under an invisible constraint. The film combines real footage in slow motion with ethereal color grading to embody a polymorphous body that reminds of the “survival of the fittest.” Evoking both Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra, the pack, at times comic, at times unsettling, stares at the camera for an extended moment before lunging toward an invisible target, invoking a collective re-reading of contemporary masculinities. In this frontal composition, the gaze is no longer unilateral; it is returned, even reversed. The window becomes, in turn, a mirror and a screen for our social hierarchies. This project seeks to reclaim language and symbols, to nuance binary oppositions, and to open doors toward understanding the mechanisms that could guide us to a less competitive and more empathetic social script, to comprehend where predators are fragile, and where companion species are strong.