«Berri Street» (2018)

Berri Street came from a dream I had at the time. I was walking through Montreal, or maybe through a strange and distorted version of Montreal, until I ended up in a pretty ghetto neighborhood. On a huge brick wall, there was this graffiti. I knew I had to enter that building to find out what my destiny was. In my dream, the three faces in the graffiti were alive. The one in the middle represented a drug addict in the middle of a paranoid episode, the orange one was a laughing drug dealer, and the blue one was a prostitute trying to hide. Together, the three of them formed a kind of balance of the street and reminded me a lot of the atmosphere around Émilie-Gamelin Park at the time. The green character is particular because he was strongly inspired by a drawing I had seen on the cover of L’Injecteur magazine (2018), created by a Montreal artist whose name I unfortunately don’t know. I had really loved that artwork, and the character’s features stayed in my mind... then they reappeared in my dream, along with the other two faces. When I woke up, I drew them almost immediately so I wouldn’t forget them. This painting is therefore essentially a reproduction of a graffiti from the world of my dreams.