Love and Fear
Digital Photocollage Series, Seven Works, 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan
These seven works take as their subject two fundamental emotions — love and fear. In visual art, figure and ground define each other. Neither exists without the other. Here, that formal relationship becomes a philosophical one. The ground is fear. The figures are love. One cannot exist without the other. We all love something, and fear something, they are endemic to our nature, two sides of the same sword.
The ground for all seven works is drawn from La Horde (2009), a French film widely considered one of the greatest zombie films ever made. Beneath its genre surface, the film is an allegory for the French Indochina War of 1946 to 1954 — an eight-year conflict in which France, attempting to reassert colonial rule over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, was defeated by the Viet Minh independence forces led by Ho Chi Minh. The war ended at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. France lost approximately 55,000 men. The cost of colonial hubris, rendered in blood.
Death hungry for life.
Against that ground, seven figures and objects are placed. A kiss. Two men making love. A station wagon. Dorothy. Three men standing together. An animated couple. A coney dog. Each one something familiar, something ordinary, something that belongs to love.
The ordinary moments of human connection are not diminished by the horde pressing in around them. They are illuminated by it. We see what they are worth because we see what surrounds them. The figures are the lifeboats from a sinking vessel, the ground the indifferent body of water. Where there is love, there is hope, the antidote to fear.
Two forces.
One frame.
As they always seem to be and perhaps need to be.
• La Horde (La Horde, 2009) — directed by Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher
