Crash Theory<\/em> pursues the exploration on the same emotional register. From a thematic point of view, one can thus situate the series in an exploratory continuum from the relative eroticization of anxiety (Terreurs intimes<\/em>, 2000) to the sense of alienation and isolation in Vivarium<\/em> (2004), and carrying on with the dialectic between degradation and survival in Ninfa moderna<\/em> (2010).4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - This title is taken from Georges Didi-Huberman\u2019s Ninfa moderna: Essai sur le drap\u00e9 tomb\u00e9<\/em> (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), from which the artist\u2019s debasement-survival theme likely derives.<\/span> Crash Theory<\/em> incorporates reminiscences of the broken, disengaged bodies, fetishized and obscenely suspended in their resistance, that populate \u201cNinfa moderna.\u201d Except that here the collisions, the clutter, the scrapyards are juxtaposed with the kinds of recreational sports activities that habitually sexualize women\u2019s bodies: pom-pom girls and cow girls accompany tragic scenes of traffic accidents. In popular cinematic culture, the cheerleader and cow girl are generally associated with clich\u00e9s of superficial, hypersexualized women. As such, the juxtaposition of car crashes and clich\u00e9d images of women may certainly be interpreted as an attempt to call attention to the bankruptcy of such images on a human level. It seems to me, however, that a feminist reading focused on the subversion of male car\/woman fantasies cannot fully exhaust the significance of these paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On a narrative as much as a formal level, there resides a profound ambiguity in Crash Theory<\/em>. Juxtapositions of somewhat abstract, highly gestural areas with more polished, figurative ones, together with the layering of source images transform the painting into a kind of palimpsest, its narrative remaining enigmatic, only half-articulated. A palpable, emotional tension ensues (as reflected in the impasto treatment). By not immediately revealing everything, Crash Theory<\/em> functions somewhat like desire, this anticipatory state of ever-deferred pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of form and composition, I can\u2019t help point out some unintentional affinities between Dissociations<\/em> and the formal strategies that Degas employed in his late 1890s pastels representing dancers in the wings. One unexpectedly finds in Les meneuses de claque<\/em> the anonymous faces, contorted postures, promiscuous bodies, energetic and gauzy frous-frous (or pom-poms), and vaguely-delineated confined spaces that surround Degas\u2019s dancers. In Degas, all these elements\u200a\u2014\u200athe vagueness (which some have interpreted as a tendency toward abstraction), the anonymity, the hard-to-define postures\u200a\u2014\u200amake the representation deliberately ambiguous, and the power relationship equivocal, as it oscillates between attraction and repulsion, between objectivising and individuating the dancers.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Richard Kendall, \u201cSigns and non-Signs: Degas\u2019 Changing Strategies of Representation,\u201d in Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision<\/em>, edited by Richard Kendall and Griselda Pollock (London: Pandora Press, 1998 [1992]), 198.<\/span> What are the specificities of such effects in Crash Theory<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would like to suggest that these zones of ambiguity\u200a\u2014\u200athe untellable story, the veiled (or restrained) violence\u200a\u2014\u200asuggest an ambivalent sensibility, a situation that mingles feelings of anxiety and rapture, \u201cthe uncanny\u201d (das Unheilmliche<\/em>) that Freud spoke of.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Sigmund Freud, \u201cThe Uncanny\u201d (Das Unheilmliche<\/em>), first published in Imago<\/em>, Vol V, 1919.<\/span> For Freud, the concept of the uncanny serves to describe the tension between temptation and horror, between desire and fear, resulting from a process of interiorizing initially disturbing images (here, images from the media and popular culture) that have become familiar. In the case before us, the uncanny emerges from a particular eroticization of horror, a rather troubling relationship between the body and the mechanical smash-up. The juxtaposition of sexualized figures and scenes of collision amid heaps of refuse provokes a discomfort that does in fact recall\u200a\u2014\u200ain a more restrained fashion, I admit\u200a\u2014\u200athe mood of David Cronenberg\u2019s controversial film, Crash.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Crash<\/em>. Directed by David Cronenberg. Canada\/UK: Alliance Communications Corporation\/The Movie Network\/Telefilm Canada\/British Recorded Picture Company, 1996.<\/span> Exploring the relationship between sexuality and the machine, a favoured theme of Futurist Filippo Marinetti, Cronenberg stages marginal characters who fetishize car crashes and for whom pleasure is inseparable from pain, sex from death. The underlying subject of Cronenberg\u2019s film, however, is the transformation of the body through a dehumanizing technological society where sexuality, conceived as pure pleasure, a sex drive detached from any emotion, morality, or norm, is only possible through extreme, destructive experiences. Certainly, the raw realism of Cronenberg\u2019s film has nothing to do with Major\u2019s suggestive proposal. Nonetheless, like Cronenberg\u2019s Crash<\/em>, Crash Theory<\/em> stages the relationship human beings have with their bodies in the age of machines and, I would add, in the reigning age of the image\u200a\u2014\u200afor Crash Theory<\/em> is the result of an accumulation of images and examines our vision of the body in its rapport with the machine, ultimately defined by and as image.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/76_DO10_Pageot_Major_Fausse-relique-scaled.jpg\")
de la s\u00e9rie | from the series Crash Theory<\/em>, 2011.
photo : Guy L\u2019Heureux, permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/76_DO10_Pageot_Major_Compulsion-scaled.jpg\")
de la s\u00e9rie | from the series Crash Theory<\/em>, 2011.
photo : Guy L\u2019Heureux, permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n