Humans of the Decadence will be a hand-embroidered painting and modern interpretation of the original painting Romans of the Decadence (Les Romains de la Décadence, 15′ 6″ x 25′ 4″ / 472.44 x 722.16 cm, oil paint) made by the French artist Thomas Couture, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1847, a year before the 1848 Revolution which toppled the July Monarchy which now belongs to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. 

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I have a long history with the original painting by Couture. In my first encounter with the work in 2015 I came across the painting in a social media post that displayed a photo of it as a backdrop in a travel article. I searched for more information about this oddly intriguing image, and as I learned more about it I became fascinated with it, and not just the imagery itself. I learned that the artist who made it (Thomas Couture) was disgusted with the culture and society he was living in. Couture was presenting a powerful critique of his day using a time prior than his own to make the point and he did so in a bold large-scale historical painting format; in other words, it's not so subtle. I love this about the painting. It seems, to our modern eyes, to be a big, formal history painting, but when you actually learn about it, it is one hell of a slap in the face to the world he lived in.

 

I had the privilege of making a trip to Paris specifically to see the painting at the Musée d'Orsay in 2016, and this began my interest in recreating this artwork. It was everything and more than I had imaged, a grand and sweeping gesture, heroically gutsy and important, and yet it has this odd air of being forgotten, overlooked, not taken to heart, as empires marched onwards after its creation, repeating the same mistakes; I am speaking specifically of the American empire. Additionally, the size of the painting, in person, felt off putting, as if Couture knew it was too much, like he was hiding a message that he felt might be too dangerous to make directly about the current powers that be, and yet he knew that with these almost absurd proportions that the viewer would be forced into a deeper read.

 

I began to understand Romans of the Decadence as a message across the ages, a dire warning from one era of empire to future eras about the lies built into our ideas about progress. It said to me very clearly and very loudly that all future generations should heed this warning lest they fall into the same trap of privilege and malaise that Couture was forcing us to consider with this massive work of art. I  believe that Couture's warning was spot on; we haven't evolved much beyond the time of this painting; today we are just as mired in our own decadence; drunk with malaise, a (Western) culture drowning in mindless consumerism and self-fascination, and at such a great cost to ourselves and the world. So, this has become my purpose and mission with recreating this artwork; I want to present a critical and sober view of Western decadence today, so that we may hopefully see ourselves and move forward from it. I intend to use my particular approach to showing decadence and what I call the "failed state" of humanity by focusing on those who suffer from this decadence. Couture wanted to show us the drunken malaise of the peak of the Roman empire as a way to present a metaphor for what he saw in France during the late 19th century. I want to show the ramifications of this same drunken malaise across the world; I want to show the profound hurt and suffering it has caused in order to call us to awaken to our (Western) ways so that we may change and hopefully embark on a much different and better path for ourselves and humanity. This has always been a recurring theme in my work: the idea of complicity, of participation, of asking how much of the blame for any of our social ills can be placed on the system and how much can be placed on us, and where is that line exactly.

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From Google Arts & Culture:

 

"It took Thomas Couture three years to complete The Romans of the Decadence the proportions of which betray grand artistic ambitions. He wanted to give fresh impetus to French painting and to do so referred, rather conventionally, to the masters of ancient Greece, the Renaissance and the Flemish school. The work is a history painting, regarded as the noblest genre during the 19th century: it therefore had to represent human behavior and convey a moral message. This was explained by Couture himself, who quoted two lines from the Roman poet Juvenal, (c. 55-c.140 AD) in the catalog for the 1847 Salon where the painting was exhibited: "Crueler than war, vice fell upon Rome and avenged the conquered world". In the center of the painting, Couture has placed a group of debauched revelers, exhausted and disillusioned or still drinking and dancing. In the foreground are three men who are not taking part in the drunken revels: on the left, a melancholic boy sitting on a column and on the right two foreign visitors casting a disapproving eye over the scene. The antique statues looming above the group also seem to be condemning the orgy. Apart from illustrating an ancient text, Couture was alluding to French society of his time. A Jacobin, Republican and anticlerical, he criticized the moral decadence of France under the July monarchy, the ruling class of which had been discredited by a series of scandals. This painting is therefore a "realist allegory", and the art critics of 1847 were quick to see in these Romans "The French of the Decadence". 

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