Geneviève Savard
My creative reflection is intimately linked to Susan Sontag’s essay “Regarding the pain of others”. Through art I am able to inquire into the different reactions we have toward human suffering, be it weariness, indifference or the complete absence of compassion. “The executioner” came to appear to me as a representative figure of these tendencies. I work at once with the idea of the active executioner and that of the passive victim of the latter. These two entities are, in a sense, one and the same.
The hooded executioner, whom I link to financial thugs and white-collar criminals of all sorts, takes on the allure of a super-hero. In the summit of his ivory tower, he is untouchable, unattainable, as he builds his fortune on the backs of workers. Our society glorifies these torturers, “savers” of nations, bloody administrators and calculators of pain. I created this series to cry out my revolt, my powerlessness and my distress in the face of this system of neoliberal barbarism. Thus in my own way I denounce these injustices, here and elsewhere, captured in the “spilling” of paint which incarnates my disgust.
The hood in the case of the passive character is, in turn, an iron shield which protects me from quotidian atrocities. In the anonymity of my indifference I wearily put on this horror-soaked hood and hide behind the pain of others.
A world of masks, with a muzzled majority and a lethal minority.
