Confronted with this revolting work « once had to oppose a collective gesture to these words and the barbarism they engendered » Jean-Marie Antenen, illustrator and writer.
The aim of the picture here is to crush the words.
Today’s community, outraged, traumatised, annihilates here what annihilated an old community 60 years ago, it was yesterday.
Notre Combat (Our Struggle) is a book born out of the desire to « make another book, not a book against or opposed, but a book in lieu of, in the same place, to put our hands in this inferno, » Thierry Illouz, Le Support Impossible, writer and contemporary theatre author.
This page came from its own darkness to put up a fight, and i won. Just like Van Gogh in « my art i put my life ».
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The setting :
A room in a museum where the tyrant used to say he had his place.
Silence is gold in this room where 6 people are thinking. They are the silent workers, the exact opposite of the physical violences inflicted by the one they are watching.
The safety cord is here to protect them from the painting they are looking at.
The picture :
Hitler disembodied, personifies aversion, the despicable, in what could be a Duchamp work of art, with the appropriation of the allography LHOOQ turned to LHOA (sounding like Shoah).
A bad play on word for a bad human being, represented here dripping.
In this picture the tyrant is melting. He is collapsing and everything he represents disappears with him. It is as if the thoughts, reflexion and the collective effort of the 6 people standing in front of him make him disappear.
The characters :
They are 6, like the 6 branches of the Star of David, symbolising the shield of David. They are facing the monster dictator .
How ironical and what a lack of wisdom to have obliged jewish people to distinguish themselves by wearing this star, seen on the shields in all battles won by jews, symbole of resistance and victory since the VIIth century BC .
The viewer joins them as the seventh person facing the tyrant, they represent a Menorah, in Hebrew the ancestral seven-branched candelabrum, symbol of light, faith and expectations.
They are wondering, taking notes on this personification of the horror .
Hitler who depreciates intellectuals in this text is now being crushed by their pen.
And when he says « the man who knows something, who sensed a danger » has to «publicly fight against evil » well, that’s exactly what we did in Notre Combat, turning his own arguments against him, publicly anihilating his text.