Little Monsters is a colourful piece of work made by Hervé. With this series, the artist is pointing out the place that we give to penises nowadays in our society, and remember us, that at the end of the day we are just talking about penises and nothing else.
Isn’t the penis the ultimate symbol of power? In old (and not so old) paintings penises are disguised as towers, swords or guns, while in our ultra explicit times — when metaphors are hardly still necessary – bare erected penises are all over the internet and virtual chat platforms. The small – but all too big – difference between men and women is overcoded with meanings, fraught with expectations, that have turned an innocent difference into a millennia-old hierarchy. The series Little Monsters revisits the infamous object and offers a deconstructive reflection on its symbolic power. Those little monsters do not have a male body to support them, nor to inject them with the blood needed to perform their erected glory. But they are not dead. They get a life of their own, no longer threatening, almost comic. In Hervé’s visual study qualities like force, domination and power are dissolved but leave a trace. In the space of their absence we can suddenly see anew — with empathic eyes — a strange and vulnerable organ that hardly resembles its old self.
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