Quentin Fromont is a visual artist from Paris, France. He is interested in fantasies and how they can create spaces of freedom and exploration of the complexities of intimacy. Through his images, installations, sculptures, and performance readings, his work explores the vulnerability of bodies in the face of violent experiences, such as sexuality or illness, oscillating between beauty and absence, disease and healing.
Esther: Hi Quentin, thanks for joining us today. Could you introduce yourself, your practice, and why you chose to participate in Hidden Narratives?
Quentin: My practice is focused on images and videos. I also work with text, sculptures, and readings. I explore fictional worlds of fantasies. In these stories, there is violence but also sweetness, linked with sexuality and disease.
I chose to participate in Hidden Narratives because your theme and explorations are interesting and related with my own practice. There are intertwined stories and actions hidden in these fictions.
Esther: You have a very unique medium and method, unlike anything we’ve exhibited. Could you talk about how you came to use these and how they’ve helped you storytell through art?
Quentin: I began in arts with photography and graphic design. I worked a lot with images, but first in editions. Afterwards, I went to a fine art school, then another more specialized photography school. Here, I began to work with homosexuality and sexualities. I mostly worked on cruising areas, which are spaces where men go to be free in their sexuality. I was exploring a cruising area in the south of France. It was on a beach, that began with my discovering of landscapes, but ended in a sexual assault. After this experience, I wrote a text that I performed a lot. That was the beginning of my practice right now.
After this experience, I worked a lot with the coastline, homosexuality, and love. I really wanted to work on “auto-fictions”— I use “I” in the texts, but they are fictional, so they have distance from me.
I wanted to make dreamy images of this space, with men laying on the beach and the sun shining. I went to my parents house. This was during Covid. I couldn’t create because I was in my room, so I decided to go to pornography. Maybe there was something interesting in all those images of white virile men.
I tried printing on transparent paper. The images came out randomly with ink flowing, fluid. It was interesting because I was talking about a violent experience and it came out in a really different way. But it’s also cool in that it allows me to create fantasies about the story and person in the work.
After that, I continued to train in new printing techniques. I use water, it’s really interesting materially because it is linked to the sea, but also human liquids like saliva. These techniques and art allowed me to create a universe physically.
Esther: You're really an anthropologist! You create with your own encounters. You tell a story that's individual, but could be about anybody. I’m also interested in how you mention fluids. In class, we were talking about blood, how it’s fluid and can be used to connect or divide us.
This fluidity fits well your storytelling, not only for materiality. You show how dreams can become nightmares. We’re relational beings, things can change in a moment. This ambiguity engages different audiences differently.
Quentin: I really like that. When I use fluids, the images are blurred and make these bright, colorful, and utopic scenes. Different people see different things. Sometimes, in the really blurred images, people will see a sexual scene but others could see a hug or an animal.
Esther: Tell us about these anonymous, blurring bodies.
Quentin: The anonymity comes from the fact that I don't want to take pictures of people. I prefer to fantasise about the images I will create, that’s why I use pornographic images. I want to show a random, stereotypical guy. The men never look the audience in the eyes, they're always hiding, like hunter and prey.
Anonymity is really important for meeting people quickly without catching the real person. In between a caress and violence, it’s important those guys could be anyone.
There is criticism about masculinity here. I only use white muscular guys in my work, it’s important to critique these representations of bodies.
Esther: Can you tell us about your “fictions” and how you explore tensions within them?
Quentin: The fictions I create are moving worlds where everything can crash. I'm always trying to create a beautiful world and, in narration, trying to choose the danger that arrives. It could be disease, desire, or sexual aggression.
What I like the most is that you can think you are in a dream, but there is always danger. The danger can come from the protagonist themselves. Maybe there is no danger, but the protagonists imagine it.
Esther: You create scenes where people move through scenes in time, but time is manipulated. You also pull from archival images and myths. Could you talk about how time plays into your work?
Quentin: In these fictions, I extend time. It’s always summer, on a beach, near the sea, or in a villa in the south of France. Extending time allows me to blur a dream or a nightmare; danger is arriving before the protagonist falls asleep. We never know what's real, what's not. That's why sometimes the images are really blurred, but others aren’t, just to let people catch hints of the stories.
I work with the myth of Endymion. It’s really the heart of all of these fictions. Endymion, a shepherd, falls in love with the goddess of the moon, Selene. In one version, Selene transforms into a chimera and goes to him to see if he’s really in love with her. He kisses the chimera and Zeus punishes him and makes him fall asleep forever. So the goddess meets him at the night when he’s asleep.
This myth permits me to link everything in my work—videos, sculptures, and images of homosexuality and the landscapes, because nothing is real and the danger can be imagined or not.
Quentin: J’AI FAIM DE TOI was a political piece I made quickly. I had been hearing homophobic slurs and was questioning the future of queer relationships. We made it political by mimicking photoshoots of heterosexuals waiting for a baby, with two bodies that could never have a baby together. That doesn't make our love less important. This is my own and a common experience of queer love being discriminated.
L’autel réanimation is a really personal piece because it's a picture of me in intensive care. I think that creates distance with the subject of the image because the shape relates to altars where you pray, or the front of houses in Greece with little windows where you put sacred objects like the Virgin Mary. That was kind of funny. It became an ex-voto, vowing to make the body good.
In the others, I use pornographic images. It's really important to me to continue to make existent aesthetics from the homosexual community. They’re young white men, but by intertwining those bodies, they appear as sirens and chimeras. They exist and live with a different intention, only from their bodies.
TRANSPOTES and LES SIRÈNES show entwined bodies, seemingly consumed by their own desire for flesh.
Esther: A component of our show is speaking about the connection between the personal and shared. Can you elaborate on your experiences with the themes in your work?
Quentin: My work is about fantasies, disease, and sexuality. I think being a homosexual man, it’s not an obligation, but I work from what I live and for what people around me and I fight for. It’s important to me to talk about minorities. Masculinity has been deconstructed early in my life and in my practice.
I've been experiencing a lot with the way my body was tired, during hospitalization, and the violence in sexual encounters. It’s important for me to speak to this in my art, and let it go. In the beginning, it was to permit people to recognize themselves in these stories or experiences.
Esther: What's next for you?
Quentin: I'm really, really happy about exhibiting with you. It’s my first international exhibition, and there will be others. This is the first time I am going to show my work in other countries with different audiences.
I have an exhibition in Berlin in October, one end of October in Paris, and a solo show in November. For my solo show, I'm really excited because I will show old images, but this is the first time I will make an installation without images to talk about disease, where the text is a real, autonomous piece.
This marks the beginning of new, arriving projects. I think it's important in my practice to make these ideas exist in different ways, not only through people, but the violence of bodies, without showing bodies.