Clément Cogitore collected the prize on Monday, 15 October, 2018 on the 18th edition of the Prix Marcel Duchamp for his work The Evil Eye, produced by Galerie Eva Hober gallery.

With The Evil Eye, Clément Cogitore tackles a relationship with images and grand narratives based on the use of videos from image banks (Getty, Shutterstock ...), major purveyors of content for all types of advertising and television. Shot against a green background, they operate a summation of stereotyped postures, generic gestures adaptable to demand on sets added in post-production. They are part of an astonishing story of manipulation techniques and publc persuasion, from the early theories of mass psychology by Gustave Le Bon at the end of the 19th century and techniques invented by Edward Bernays. The latter, first advising the US government in 1916 to gain the consent of the population to enter an unpopular war, it was then at the service of the largest American companies for the implementation of the most formidable consumerist strategies.

The green background, meanwhile, finds its sources in the first superimposition experiments by Georges Méliès at the end of the 19th century, before its intensive use in advertising as cinema, with analog video and then with digital.

Summoning these images superficial images, overexposed by the powerful luminescence of a monumental LED screen, Clément Cogitore reveals the dystopian vision of a happiness saturated with smiles, idle hair movements, devitalized artificial beauty, real hypnotic injunctions intended to arouse the most unconscious buying instincts.

On the images, a woman's voice addresses to a loved one an incantatory plea: she is the voice clamoring in the desert of a totalitarian materialism, a supplicating voice, vindictive, predictive. Between archaisms and current apocalyptic narratives, she accompanies the images of an elegiac song of complaint and terror addressed to a humanity in dereliction.
The artwork The Evil Eye de Clément Cogitore was produced by Galerie Eva Hober with the support of Noirmontartproduction, Kazak Productions, ARTE, CNAP and Henri Ellam & Associés.