JULIEN BONET - Industrialist

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2023

Signed, dated and edition numbered by the artist on a separate label.

Industrialist

A man in a suit, wrapped in a tangle of tubes and cables. No face, no skin, just black coils winding around his body like the veins of a machine. Behind him, an abandoned gas station—a relic of an industry as omnipresent as it is decaying.

In the artist's words: "A scapegoat for economic and ecological problems. He attempts to spray passersby with a mixture of water and soot. The costume eventually burns in thick black smoke."

Bonet's Industrialist updates an ancient ritual: the scapegoat. In numerous cultures, masked figures carried the collective guilt, were mocked, banished, or burned to purify the collective. But here, the scapegoat is not a demon of nature, but a child of the industrial age: a myth of cables, oil, and soot, born of our own dependencies.

The figure represents the unease of our present—caught between blame and repression. It embodies not only ecological and economic crises, but also our need to personalize these crises: When we see "industry" in a mask, it seems easier to fight it without questioning ourselves.

Part of the ongoing series Masquerades – contemporary myths between fear, ritual and collective memory.