Sketches | Read the gospel and brush your teeth

Artist Marc Séguin offers his unique perspective on current events and the world.

It was in 1988, on an overpass. “Read the Gospel,” in capital letters, was stenciled on with spray paint, and the “brush your teeth,” in attached letters, was obviously written by someone else with a brush.

A tough week for feelings: Roxham Road – its violent closure – and media cars and trucks all over my campaign. A provincial budget that a government wanted to be a party and which instead had bad ratings. We also learned that all the schools are beautiful and in order. And this advertisement-sermon on French for young people…

Raising more questions than solutions, this one stuck in my little head (and a sigh). I wondered how, exactly, a form of disconnection from reality, and a fracture, takes place between the generations.

I love the cow floor. But I also really like concrete and asphalt, fascinated by living together and urbanity.

Natural interventions, those on the fringes, reassure me about the state of the world. To this end, I have enormous respect for urban art, a free and frosted which relieves of a present that certain well-meaning would like to improve by excesses theoretical or too scholarly, willingly replacing the priests of the old world. Sighs, therefore, hearing the advertising on the “anglicized” language of young people. The decline started longer than us…

Somewhere in their bourgeois anxiety, an uncle or an aunt will have decided that chill, insane Or sick were going to sound the death knell of the French language when for several decades, hundreds of Anglicisms have been used daily: bumper, rack, shift, show, groupie, flush, momentum, varied, lift, dispatch, brakes, fan, bum, guts, weekend, overdose, puff, loose, boxing day, set, trip, timing, cheap, dealer, top, sold out, plug, book, boyfriend, pattern, back order, coolhave drive… The Office québécois de la langue française lists more than 300. Oh, there are also top gun that should be added to this list.

If leading by example must come from above, it can also come from below. Like in urban art.

So, this week, a plea in photos.

A health report around this language which continues to live, persisting in surviving; which is still spoken and written in 2023. Some claim its sensitivity and the importance of showing it to us on street furniture with a dose of dissidence which, precisely, highlights its relevance and the merits of the challenge as a valid and essential marker of social identity.

I have a lot of respect for wild gestures, and sometimes less for those in the administrative corridors.

On this language, also carried by unofficial artists and thinkers and for whom it is beautiful enough to name and say what we are. Faultless and poetic. Demonstrate the monstrous gap between the intentions of the Bible and a simple toothbrush.

The images above are by Alexandre Arnold, a fine arts graduate from Concordia and a chemistry researcher at UQAM, who makes this a wonderful photo project.