The diptych Immortality is Just a State of Mind was
created on the return of the artist's trip to Moscow. It consists of a
masculine figure, inspired by that of the heroic sailor depicted in the
foreground of the painting La Défense de Sébastopol (1942) by
the painter Alexandre Deïneka (1899-1969). Executed by Jean-François Octave in
the illusion of a mosaic, the work refers to the monumental achievements of
this Soviet painter, including that of the Mayakovskaya metro station in
Moscow. A senestre, the sentence of the title is painted in
capital letters, as an authoritative advertising slogan; it is derived from the
famous song Just an Illusion, from the post-disco group
Imagination, released in 1982, which was a planetary success.
Emblematic of Octave's
work, the work mixes references that are ideologically opposed: on the one
hand, the hero-like staging of the defenders of Sevastopol against the Nazi
invasion, in the classical register of Socialist Realism and, on the other
hand, the apparent lightness of the pop reference, an illustration of
capitalism exploiting all the stages of mass entertainment for commercial
purposes; even though it contains forms of subversion (the disco subculture
being the first ostensible stage for homosexuality). The artist also highlights
the eroticism of this young man with a muscular body, emphasising that the
working man’s imagery by Socialist Realism exudes a certain (homo) sexual
idealisation of the male body. This (homo)sexual idealisation is also one of
the powers behind disco music... By associating these two opposing ideological
conceptions, Jean-François Octave emphasises the same use of the sexual realm,
on both sides of the old iron curtain.
