Both an opening to this New Year and a gift, you are offered a unique incursion in a space like none, Skwak’s, or rather the one of his “Maniacs”, the characters both funny and frightening that colonize his universe. Besides, the inhabitants of the "Maniac World" show ostentatiously a monstrous smile that seems particularly ambiguous, because we can’t really know if they are actually trying to appeal to us or if they are coaxing us into loving them. If this parallel world seems abounding, colourful and entertaining at first, it soon turns out sweltering and suffocating.
Actually, what we see is a contaminated and spoiled planet, populated by the “Maniacs”, degenerated humans, as touched by a mysterious scourge that makes them more and more vicious, more and more calculating, more and more unsound, more and more awful. Fearing neither God nor man, they weave a society racked by overconsumption, overabundance, and abuse while evolving in Skwak’s compositions, as chaotic as them because of this profusion of elements and colours. Both wonderful and oppressive, the “Maniac World” is the product of its inhabitants, polluted by all kinds of aggressions and degradations which motto is: “always more”: always more money, more sex, more power. But this world appears enchanting as well, as the Maniacs bask in colonizing it and keep it in its own decay: for them, it’s nothing but heaven. It’s the reason why Skwak’s canvases are so vivid and attractive, as pleasant as a Toys’Rus invaded by the Grimlins.
The Maniacs work out their annihilation through degeneration and excess, cultivating agony and degradation, practicing plastic surgery to reach perfection in deformity, corruption to be richer and more powerful. They just want more and more in all.
Skwak tells the story of this community through his canvases reminding of Aboriginal paintings thanks to their brilliance, their visual intensity, all over the framework full with this mass of elements and characters.
Masters such as Combas or Haring also influence the artist.
For his first personal exhibition at ADDICT Galerie, Skwak proposes “Born to be a Maniac”: this is the genesis to the History of the Maniacs, a developing species.
As an artistic birth, Skwak intends to infiltrate these specimens in order to reveal the Maniac nature.“Doom Generation” by Greg Araki, Britney Spears’ last video clip, a reality show and a bit of TV news, Skwak get his inspiration from the screens and the contemporary world. Transposing the activities of everyday life in this parallel sphere, he depicts how ridiculous, asphyxiated and imprisoned we are as a vision of our own world.
We already know the “Maniac World” in 3D; it would not be impossible to get it animated. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental, of course.