Here Ophelia would rather look like a character by A. Hitchcock. Shall we say derision of a myth or an adaptation to the Zeitgeist? Jack Ilhe is an heir to comic strips and horror films, and should he be staring paintings of the last centuries, he dared what everybody beforehand would have thought impossible : he is keen on pedantic academic bookish scholastic artists (for which the French language has a single euphemism the term "pompier"). Prejudices use to be so swiftly swapped for other prejudices. To day with our unconditioned admiration for the scud-before-the-anecdote form of art, we have the pretense to be drifting apart from any kind of fad hence, wa are forgetting that such a taste for fashion had always been dressing the main myths ( i.e. "joint venture fantasies") of the world up.
A world painted by Jack Ilhe is full of cruel children, little girls uncovering their womanhood hidden behind their first communicant dress, too beautiful creatures too much on the edge of the doorway of life for not being frightened to death, yet the end? Craddle and grave marching two abreast. The sheen of all these lights and realities is scaring the wraiths of different beings looming out of a universe which had drowned in its slumber as they are wrapping themselves up in the gaudy clothes of History. Not in order to have the comedy being enacted, but to keep up themselves. Then you'll discover, as your screening along these pictures brimming over with stories, weepings, fears, slim silhouettes showing liana-women on the brink of swooning, withdrawn into silence with strangely irresponsive faces, and roving in uncanny set-ups the theatricality of which stands between Dracula's Castel and winterwoods by Gaspard Friedrich.
It takes a bit of doing and some self-reliance to dare this long progress amongst the objects of the Freudian bric-a-brac that keeps us back as a trap and drag us along into cloudy waters that are latent or at the bottom of our id.