In The Condition of Being (2012), a modern fossil lays behind a Plexiglas cover. The strange head of this dissected animal tilts down, its long pig ears act as blinders, and it appears to be staring at its swollen abdomen. True to form, Mayaux uses equal parts whimsy and farce to create a tantalizing tragedy. He continues his fanciful anthropological study of contemporary man with the series “Ghosts of Authority.” These stereolithographic busts are composed of balloon heads, masked eyes and trumpet mouths. Each one plays advertisements, dictator’s discourses and other audio archives of power. Eight tempera paintings on wood depict a fictive

past from which only a series of small idols have survived. Each scene records a fiery apocalypse of a lost civilization. The ancient fetishes are actually modern-day compositions of industrially manufactured shapes from everyday products, such as toothpaste and detergent. The paintings transpose the sensibility of Hieronymus Bosch into Haim Steinbach’s ethnographic interest in the readymade.

Mayaux’s twenty-five years of painting have influenced a new generation of French artists.

His attentive brushstrokes and intricate sculptures create an intimate translation of needs and contemporary desires. Always grotesque but never vulgar, his works repulse us just enough so that we gaze at present-day society as if it were an ancient culture. Simultaneously, they titillate and beguile us so that we never look away.