QUARANTINED SALIVA (LES SENTIMENTS OCÉANIQUES)

The hagfish is a seabed anguilliform animal and makes good use of sea water to produce a kind of mucus to relax. It releases a chemical substance through a row of pores positioned on its flanks. These chemical products immediately react with sea water to form a filamentous mucus. When the predator inhales this product, it suffocates. In order to protect itself from its own mucus, the hagfish winds around itself to form a knot that it slips afterwards along the entire length of its body to wipe it.

This protecting or lethal substance is the starting point of this installation and the nature of the photomontage that forms it. In my work, painting, sculpture and photography commonly merge to dialogue through iconographic corpus emerging from diverse places. The frame of a painting here becomes a sculpture, the picture becomes decoration, each medium backs up the aim of another one.

Quarantined Saliva questions our ambiguous connection with bodily fluids. Yet repulsive, they are at the heart of numerous beliefs, and the best way to represent and question the bodies and their inwardness. They combine brilliance and cyclical movement, are used as metaphor for the expression of our emotions, and finally have a powerful sexual nature. They can be soft or toxic and unveil a flowing intimacy. This intimacy is isolated by this window that yet highlights it.