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Jean-François Lepage: ZOMBIE

GUP Magazine
2020

Text: Linda Zhengová

 

There are many associations with the word ‘zombie’, why did you choose this word as title? Does it perhaps refer to the obscured notions of ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ evoked from your images?

 

I have no particular affinity for brainless zombies that move through grapes attacking and eating poor and stupid humans, but they still make me laugh. I have always been attracted by the mysteries of death and all the tales and legends about this particular subject. Not by morbid attraction, certainly not … or not only. But because all of these stories about death most of the time celebrate life. It is certainly through my younger age when I was reading novels by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe as well as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that this attraction for the unknown, the experimentation was born. So, it’s spontaneously established between me and the imaginative worlds of the undead, a very special affection for vampires, werewolves, revenant, ghosts. But the real reason of this subject and choice of title was finally, because my seven years old and youngest daughter, Saule, spent the whole summer 2018 talking to me about her animated cartoons full of zombies, claiming that being gothic was cool. It was without a doubt the right pick for the second opus of my ‘Recycle Project’.

 

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