Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; The Wet Eyes Of The Sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.
The Wet Eyes of the Sentimentalist tackles the relationship between portraiture and nostalgia, violence and sentimentality. On the base of ethnographic photographs, this series deconstructs the aesthetic habit of consuming, re/producing and preserving the violence of colonial imagery and archives. By means of copying, cutting, washing, sowing and interlacing, the artist distorts, re-imagines and re-creates segments of these images as large-scale portraits.
Portraiture is an instrument of power – a cultural practice and a tool of rendering people hyper-visible and invisible at the same time. While the original photographs – most of them so called “typifying” postcards published by a French ethnographer based in Dakar at the turn of the 20th century – reenact the violence and the relationships of abuse between photographer and photographed, this series proposes a space beyond the voyeurism and exoticism of the colonial gaze.