Jacinthe Loranger
Let them eat cake

Let them eat cake

Images do more than represent the world. They produce narratives, construct fears, identify enemies, and promise revelations. Long before the advent of social media, they were already fueling rumours, propaganda, and collective beliefs. Engravings of witches’ sabbaths, defamatory pamphlets targeting Marie Antoinette, and depictions of monsters and miracles all belonged to the same economy of images: one that transforms imagination into certainty.

This exhibition explores the long history of how beliefs are constructed through images. By bringing historical iconography into dialogue with AI-generated imagery, it reveals the continuities linking the persuasive strategies of the past with those of the present. Figures from history reappear in digital environments, while the visual aesthetics of wellness culture, self-improvement, and social media take on the character of new mythologies.

Throughout the exhibition, temporalities begin to collapse. Medieval illuminations coexist with Goya’s hallucinatory visions, revolutionary pamphlets encounter the polished imagery of the self-care industry, relics become screenshots, and algorithms generate apparitions that evoke both religious icons and advertising. Centuries seem to fold into one another, dissolving any stable chronology.

The exhibition brings together drawings, sculptures, and video works that form a landscape infused with humour, the grotesque, and an uncanny sense of estrangement. The sculptures resemble objects unearthed from an improbable past, as though our own era had already become an archaeological layer. The drawings assemble fragments from distant visual traditions, where satanic symbolism, political propaganda, and digital culture merge within a shared visual space. The video combines found online footage, AI-generated sequences, and references to 1970s Russian cinema to construct a narrative oscillating between fascination and unease.

Artificial intelligence occupies a central place in this research, not because of its ability to faithfully reproduce reality, but because of its imperfections. Anatomical errors, shifting perspectives, and visual inconsistencies become signs of a world in which images seem to lose their grounding. By embracing these failures, the works give material form to one of the defining conditions of our time: a reality that is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from its simulations.

Without adopting a moralizing stance, the exhibition approaches these questions with humour. Here, the grotesque functions as a revelatory device, exposing not only the absurdity of the stories we tell, but also their seductive power. For beliefs are not transmitted through ideas alone; they also circulate through images, symbols, emotions, and the fictions we collectively create.

Between the witches of the past and today’s algorithms, something remains: the desire to give shape to what escapes our understanding. It is within this space, where doubt nourishes the imagination as much as certainty, that the exhibition takes shape. Its title is a quotation by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that has been falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette.