Sapristi, Sorcellerie et saint Sacrilège

Dimensions variable
Acryl, Lacquer, Medium and (Iridescent) Pigments
on Okoumé panels.

Antoine Waterkeyn‘s artistic practice manifests itself in the perpetual writing and rewriting of plots and narrative constructions. He plays with archetypes and characters from famous novels or from our collective memory. In his works, the narrative is deliberately left open to interpretation.

In this series, Antoine Waterkeyn presents an installation of larger-than-life painted figures. The artist is inspired by the character of the monstrous figure in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog and the Court of Miracles (La Cour des miracles) in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. Based on these stories, Waterkeyn imagines a Eurovision competition for intellectuals, bringing together the winners of an atypical, little-awarded category: a collection of anti-heroes and villains from popular culture.

The artist takes us back to the marginalized figures of the Court of Miracles in the Middle Ages: beggars, hoodlums, vagabonds posing as cripples in the streets of Paris to deceive passers-by. As if by a miracle, at nightfall, they suddenly start walking normally, or regain their sight or the use of their limbs.

By gathering these iconic characters, Antoine Waterkeyn pays tribute to the anti-heroes of his collection. In this way, the artist holds up an inverted mirror of today’s dominant bourgeois society.
— Tania Nasielski