PHILIPPE HUART

"Purple in the morning, blue in the afternoon, orange in the evening. And green at night. Just like that. One, two, three, four." Hubert Selby Jr. - Requiem for a Dream.

"In Philippe Huart's new exhibition the artist delves even further into the worsening condition of reality that he sees as a corollary of the consumer society and its addictive effects.

Candy, pills, soft drinks, weapons, references to pop culture and drug-dealers' slang - all of these things plunge us into a chaos that is typical for our time with its psychotic deviations that have nevertheless become so much a part of our life that we have stopped ever letting them worry us. Yet, no matter how appealing it may seem, even the world depicted in "Junkfood" has its darker side, and it is precisely this that Philippe Huart has chosen to reveal to us.

His paintings depict our human frailty in the face of the tribulations of our primal condition. The solution seems to be to flee at all costs, heedless of the risk of descending into a kind of madness, a fact that we humans are not totally unaware of. From a distance the images seem to exert an irresistible force of attraction upon us: "Come and get it!" they beckon. But as soon as you approach these objects of desire, you are struck by diffuse feelings of a suffocating excess suggesting that all of this is far too beautiful to be totally innocuous. At the last moment we are warned by the appearance of a word. It informs us that what we see may well be alluring - mesmerising even - but that it can also be lethal. In all his work Philippe Huart always introduces the ambivalent antitheses of attraction and abhorrence.

Like Philip K. Dick in the world of literature the main theme is the concept of reality. What is real and what is illusion? Is one person's perception of reality the same as another's? Can it be that the chemical changes that take place in the brain as a result of overindulgence in various addictive substances and behaviour (drugs, sugar, guns, Mickey Mouse) propel us towards the deceptions of an artificial dream world where it is simpler to live and comforting to seek refuge? Or do they enable us to come into contact with an alternative reality?

The artist invites us to reflect on the search for instant gratification and its consequences. Our actions are never without cause and effect. Sooner or later we must pay the price for this.

Patrick Blain
December 2008 "(Philippe Huart)

☁ PHILIPPE HUART
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