'Couloir', Infrared I, 'Madrid I', 'Madrid II', 'Untitled', 'Untitled', 'Canicule', 'Moscow I', 'Moscow II',

Oil painting on paper mounted on canvas, Oil painting on wood, 2004

This series was created a few years after the shock of 9/11 and the start of terrorist attacks against western countries. With this series, Cecile Desmeules Harrison explored the psychological impact world press images has on viewers and attempted to reduce the emotional distance the public has with violent imagery using the painting medium. 

For this series, Cécile Harrison has made a point of employing images produced by the media in order to transmit a point of view on the world that surrounds us. How to account for the ceaseless flow and the omnipresence of these images of the world, our acceptance of the violence camouflaged?

This emotional confusion towards an image, whether it is fictitious or authentic? It is through this contemporary pictorial research that C.H. remotely uses these images, by transforming them, by diverting them and by deforming them.

The result of this effect on viewers enables them a certain significant alienation of the world. Made aesthetic, the smooth and brilliant image, and the impression ambiguous, or almost abstracted from these paintings and the representation of the violence undisclosed disturb the spectator.

The artist causes an emotional disorder and seeks to push the public with confusion between attraction and rejection. While being useful, the media image is almost like the reason for a certain form of abstraction, C.H. suggests also an austere and remote protective setting, and accounts for the uneasiness that it causes.

The commonly induced sacredness of the painted image does not withdraw the responsibility from its authors, but allows freedom to make better use incarnating it.