Ars Diavoli
"Ars Diavoli" by James D. Campbell, Summer 2010, pp. 84-87
I am sitting with the artist Marc Séguin in a bagel shop on the Main in Montreal, Leonard Cohen’s old haunt. I have a few questions prepared for him but all of a sudden I am channelling the priest in the baptism scene from The Godfather. Marc is Michael Corleone. “Do you renounce Satan? And all his works?” I say. Marc: “All his works…you mean humans?” Me: “And all his pomps?” Marc: “Not for art!” Finally I ask: “Will you be baptized?” Marc: “I will, but in boiling water.” I have no business asking these questions, of course. Still, his answers are of interest to a viewer of his art.
Séguin makes light of the questions, but in his studio it is quite another matter. There, like Francis Ford Coppola in the Godfather saga, he chooses to explore the shadow side of our existence, gazing into the abyss unblinkingly. Just before the economic bubble burst at the end of 2008, when bling-bling and bang-bang were the order of the day, Séguin’s work was a sort of trenchant criticism of both: mindless violence and consumerism gone wild are his targets. His work seems to say: “No. Enough!” He hacks away at the caul around our cultural orthodoxies and excesses with surgical precision. In his paintings, wolves hunt and eviscerate humans willy-nilly. Black crows watch the feeding frenzy from on high. Popes are tarred and feathered in portraits and strut their stuff like iridescent peacocks. Hapless humans lie on the ground or stand in pools of blood with ominous magic symbols all about. A loaded silence sucks the oxygen out of vast empty spaces.
Séguin, who has long been interested in the occult, criminality and the insane as subjects for his painting, evokes in his work a world of hidden power, menace and trancelike dissonance that few of his confreres dare approach. At an early point in his career, he went over to the dark side, a sort of amateur ethnographer or investigative journalist of the wayward and satanic.
There is an implacable brutality in his paintings that is reminiscent of Goya’s The Third of May. He has addressed demons running amok in demented, Bosch-like phantasmagorias and human perps like serial killers and the criminally insane alike. But as with Coppola, what his work exposes is greater than just the workings of organized crime. He targets the disorganized crime and anarchy of life after the Fall. Here is the truly human underworld. White is black in this work, and black is white. It’s purely Biblical, even today, and you don’t have to be born-again or have a professional interest in New Covenant Theology to get what he’s on about.
In the Old Testament, Lucifer appears in the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Isaiah: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” This is the unlikely genesis of Séguin’s very own ars diavoli. It’s worth noting that the original Hebrew text of the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah does not dilate on Lucifer, a fallen angel, but rather focuses on the sins of a fallen Babylonian king who repeatedly persecuted the children of Israel, and whose original name evoked the extravagant gold and silver lining of a self-important king’s court and retinue. Think now of Séguin’s critique of our misguided consumer culture and of the pomp and circumstance of Wall Street, a casualty of its own excesses. None other than the Prince of Darkness enters from the wings of this work. When it comes to the hedge-fund robber barons, who attempt to ascend to heaven on other people’s money, Séguin is an equal-opportunity judge, jury and executioner.
He has often been preoccupied with the debased and criminal segments of society, whether on the mean streets or in the boardrooms or on CNN. He is a fearless whistle-blower, calling down popes and subjecting them to tarring and feathering in works like Infallibility—Benedictus XVI (2008) and Infallibility—Joannus XXIII (2008), the latter festooned with severed birds’ feet as well as feathers.
In his Roadkill oil paintings, wolves and coyotes are let loose to eerily lope, lunge and lap up human blood with hungry abandon. If the atmosphere is oneiric, the paintings are also intensely visceral. And no wonder: the artist finds and then takes dead wolves and coyotes to a taxidermist, slices them in half and then stitches the halves to his canvases. It’s not surprising that the viewer experiences an unsettling frisson, that the presence of real wolf skin sends ripples across the surface of the subconscious like a stone skimming water.
If it were just a matter of depicting Satan and his works, Séguin would be a latter-day Bosch of the social world. But this is only the tip of the iceberg in his practice. He is also deeply engaged with issues of representation in painting. While they meditate on the fate of Goethe’s Faust, Séguin’s paintings seldom cross the line into the realm of the baroque or the fatuous. They are not narratives; they explode storytelling in an instant. They are, instead, compacted allegories. The painter offers phantom-limb likenesses comparing two or more coexisting realities, reminding us of the functioning of parable. The literary devices of paradox and exaggeration made the parable the perfect medium for conveying the dark surprises that come in life without warning, overturning the status quo and destroying humans’ sense of security.
Séguin is unrivalled in his ability to unleash the power of a given image with an extreme economy of means; less is more takes on a new meaning in his admirably reduced work. Still, the collision of surreal images from the realm of dream and ordinary humans from the workaday world gives rise to decidedly unsettling thoughts. It is no surprise that Séguin’s idea of light reading includes literature on the black arts; he collects old grimoires and has a formidable library of such books.
For Séguin, existence is a matter of hazard and chance. Perhaps this helps explain why his work is defined by such extraordinary violence—the sheer fury one imagines is invested in each drawn line always gives one pause—and his paintings so readily invoke the awful possibilities of the human spirit in ashes and man-made mass death. His are paintings of precognition, transgression and humanity in extremis. Phantasms creep out of their backdrops. He is all about demolishing the psychic boundaries of self and other, life and death, reality and unreality, in a fierce bid to lure his viewers over an imaginary line and into his own special dreamland.
What is perhaps most convincing about his art is how its embrace of dark and harrowing subject matter works in tandem with its tough-minded affirmation of life. In the recent Astral Death (2008), a titanic black crow (actually made from six dozen dead crows shot by the artist at his farm in Hemmingford, Quebec) achieves liftoff, hovering over the death worlds of modernity like a palpable icon of our mortality.
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