Tintin, Mafalda, Calimero… It’s a real cross between the colorful world of his childhood and that of the drag queens that Luc Provost has reproduced on his canvases. The one who embodies Mado Lamotte presents until Saturday his first exhibition at La P’tite Porte.
“I never thought I’d get this far,” says Luc Provost in an interview with The duty. Painting, which he briefly touched twenty years ago, only entered his life with the arrival of COVID-19. What started out as a hobby learned on the job quickly took up most of his days.
“In the beginning, I was doing drag queen animals. A giraffe, a dog, a cat, a cow… But after about twenty animals, I told myself that I had done the trick! says the self-taught painter.
It is there that he plunges back into his childhood. At the end of his brushes, Asterix becomes Cleopatra and Smurfette dances the cancan. Bright colors, worthy of 1990s cartoons, splash across the canvases. The pace of production accelerates and Luc Provost loses sight of the time spent at the easel.
In April, nearly 75 canvases adorn the walls of his accommodation. “It was only once everything was painted that I was suggested the exhibition”, emphasizes the budding visual artist. The opening, presented by his alter ego Mado Lamotte, never influenced his work. “It was really a hobby. There was no pressure or anyone to tell me that I had to paint because I had an exhibition to prepare. I didn’t feel obligated. “.
Even though he already had a substantial quantity of works in his possession, Luc Provost continued to produce new paintings. He has painted about twenty others in recent months, including one the day before the opening. Of the number, an imposing self-portrait of Mado of three meters by four. Reproductions will also be on sale and part of the proceeds will be donated to the organization Rézo, which works with gay or bisexual men.
The pandemic, for what it has been providential, has favored a democratization of drag culture, according to Luc Provost. “There was like a craze. People wanted to see something else. […] There were a lot of drag queens doing video capsules. People took the time to look at them. Then RuPaul’s Drag Race has arrived on Netflix and Crave”, he underlines.
And drag queens are here to stay. To the gossips who would only see it as a passing fad, he wishes to recall that Mado Lamotte has been killed at least 5 times in 35 years of career. “Each time, I said to myself: ‘Okay, it’s over. Mado, we saw it quite a bit. It will calm down and people will move on, ”he says, citing the thousand projects that have revived his character.
“Full-fledged artists”
“Since drag queens have come out of clubs and we see them everywhere, they have become artists in their own right,” says Luc Provost. In a frantic succession, he cites as examples the shows of Rita Baga, the animated tales of Barbada, the television appearances of Mona de Grenoble.
So far away are those days — or rather those nights — when drag queens were confined to bars and cabarets. “Often people were drunk or stone and weren’t listening. They came up on stage, disrupting the show. It wasn’t professional,” recalls Luc Provost, who doesn’t regret moving from the middle underground to more conventional scenes.
Today, he feels drag queens are taken more seriously by the general public. Spectators no longer view them as mere curiosities, but fully appreciate their artistic contributions.
Whoever plays Mado Lamotte is amazed to see that even young children make drag queens their idols. “I just hosted a Just for Laughs gala at Tremblant. At the end, there was a little girl of around 12 who said to me: ‘You know, I love you very much, but I prefer Barbada'”, he says, punctuating his anecdote with bursts of laughter.
The “old grandmother of the gang », as Luc Provost calls himself, sees in this popularization of drag culture the sign that this performing art is more and more respected. “Honestly, I did not expect it to be democratized so quickly,” he says.