P A S S I O N (S) by Hayat

12.11 – 19.12.2015

Bodies, skulls, icons, faces, war, death, the world and love… Has image become a mythical monster whose cavern is being explored by Yves Hayat? Mixing inspirations of renowned classical painters with effective advertising codes of the modern world, the art of representation is at the center of his work as a subject but also as food for thought. Representations of icons or advertising images are numerically diverted and mixed together to report the image-inary surrounding us. This union and playing with today’s ever changing codes of representation – swallowing and digesting the past to better spit it out – bring to the surface all the perversion of images in an obvious demonstration leaving the viewer to his own reflection, and opens a societal critique. (…) Today’s society corrupts, erases what exceeds and empties the content’s container. Only the first plan would be left, if Hayat wasn’t adding depth by bringing a new perspective. He follows the heart beat of the world with acuteness, multiple transparencies and by using his own tools of representation. Despite the fact that he has worked a lot on symbols, symbolism, the representation of reality and its imaginary world, Hayat closes the eyes of his Tired icons to indicate their weariness, the loss of their meaning and true reality beyond their overexposure in the media. The artist is not in the evocation or symbolism anymore, his art is meaningful. In Mythification or Maculate Conception, he tattoos images evoking war and violence on the bodies of Christs and martyrs… These works have three levels of depth: religious, erotic and social or historical. They collide with one another, provoke the senses and from this mix of genres and shapes emerges the insight of a man and even more so, our own. This is when his work doesn’t belong to him anymore. (Julien Camy, 2013)