NO !!! to the Smothering of Painting - Long live Drunken Figuration !!! - 2004 -

In “NO!!! to the Smothering of Painting”, Philippe Orsero composes a saturated, tense scene, teetering on the edge of explosion. An artwork mostly in black and white, frozen like an ink-drenched dream, pierced at its core by a color photograph: a gleeful Santa surrounded by two nude women, posing in a kitschy Christmas setting. This photograph, pasted like a punk collage, is slashed across in pink by the title itself — a joyful, provocative act of sabotage.

Around it, Orsero’s visual universe bursts open:
— An eye, staring straight at us.
— A spiral of words coils around it: “imbécile et pourtant elle tourne” — a satirical twist on Galileo’s quote, now directed at art, society, or ourselves.
— A snail — slow and absurd — slides above a sketch of Charlie Chaplin as a dictator, a tragicomic figure.
— A black and white tricolor flag, deliberately ambiguous, denies clear belonging.
— A passing angel, and further on, a Virgin atop a column dominates a sketched village square, like a scene from a dream or a fragment of folk memory.

The photographic canvas becomes a satirical stage, populated with grotesque, tender, or cynical figures. At the bottom, a nude woman lies behind a three-rung ladder, seemingly waiting or escaping. Nearby, a cow lets out a “moo!”, while a drawn hand — extended from an arm wearing a watch — flips the image the finger.

You’ll also find 3D-rendered female characters, avatars from digital games or postmodern goddesses, floating weightlessly. The central “guru,” clad as a grotesque Santa, becomes a ridiculous icon, a parody of power, a totem of the absurd.

And then, scrawled by hand like a rebellious graffiti: “Long live Drunken Figuration!”

Not drunkenness in the sense of alcohol — but a trance of vision, a visual orgy, a deliberate overload of images, styles, references — somewhere between the sacred and the ridiculous, between mysticism and pop culture.

Orsero is not painting here — he’s orchestrating a satirical chaos, at once critical, passionate, and fiercely free.
This work doesn’t aim to please — it shakes.
It says no to boredom, no to blandness, no to uniformity.

And in this NO, it declares a furiously vivid vision of art — fragmented, excessive, drunk on itself, yet lucid.