One can easily imagine the scene, so banal that it is universal. On a moonless night, its highbeams blazing, a new car, with a new couple inside, rolls down a remote road, far from the bustle of the city. The passengers, the nuclear family of the post-atomic era, already see themselves there, deluded by the illusion of an extraordinary suburb – one of a thousand similar suburbs. In a flash, a billboard trumpeting future residential developments springs up from the tall grass and the bulrushes, inhabits the imagination for an instant, then vanishes. Steve Veilleux’s work situates us at this moment, the moment when a real estate developer’s prefabricated and prophetic image has not yet been brought to life. This series begun in 2012, shows us some of these billboards, photographed at night with a flash. However, the written information on the billboards has been erased, leaving only what might be called the “graphical rhetoric,” a matrix formed of computer-generated 3D models and snapshots of families – with fake, anonymous smiles – harvested from online image banks.

Veilleux recently added to this series a four-minute video called Contrecœur. The video is a 3D synthetic animation in which the artist uses the same principle: only the visuals, the graphics of the inserts, and the original music have been preserved. Travelling and zoom shots follow each other at a jerky, rapid pace, leaving an impression of intense vacuity and uneasiness. Because we have become familiar with this style of montage through the codes of broadcast television, at certain moments in the work we might almost think we are watching a news bulletin announcing a catastrophe in an unknown neighbourhood. This effect inevitably evokes Barthes’s semiological writings on the rhetoric of the image – that is, how the meaning of a photograph is constructed and modified depends on the legend or text that is affixed to it.

In any case, the fascinating, terrifying vertigo that we feel when we look at these works reminds us of their unsettling resemblance to the propagandistic and utopian advertising of the 1950s, at the height of the baby boom (but also of the cold war). The gaudy compositions of contemporary advertising also try – in vain? – to convince us of this simulacrum of prefabricated happiness.

Lodged like a tooth in the flesh of our most tender aspirations is the implacable resurgence of the sales pitch: regular, constant, and with an enduring, unchanging image. It remains to be seen, with a distance of a few generations and as the spectre of global collapse of ecosystems hangs over us, how the merchants of dreams will manage to sell us, one last time – even though they no longer believe it themselves – the enchantment of the domestic prison at the heart of an achievable dystopia.
Translated by Käthe Roth

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