Artist Feature: Felix d’Eon
‘Erasing shame and celebrating desire.’
From the Artist:
Felix d’Eon is enraptured by various art-historical styles such as Edwardian fashion and children’s book illustration, golden-era American comics, and Japanese Edo printmaking. In his work he attempts to make the illusion of antiquity complete, using antique papers and careful research as to costume, set, and style. His goal is perfect verisimilitude. He subverts their “wholesome” image and harnesses their style for a vision of gay love and sensibility. d’Eon treats vintage illustrative styles as a rhetorical strategy, using their language of romance, economic power, and aesthetic sensibility as a tool with which to tell stories of historically oppressed and marginalized queer communities. By painting images of queer love, seduction, sex, and romance, the gay subject is stripped of its taboo nature. Rather than focusing on the outlaw status of queer sexuality, d’Eon’s work seeks to normalize the marginal, and place the heretofore taboo subject at the center through the use of the rhetorical styles of the historically empowered and mainstream. In the artists work the illustrative imagery of the past does not cease to be wholesome through the inclusion of gay sex and sensibilities. He simply expands the notion of what wholesome is, erasing shame and celebrating desire.
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Felix was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, to a French father and a Mexican mother. At a very young age he and his family moved to Southern California, where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence. He attended college at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and subsequently lived in San Francisco until 2010, when he returned to his native Mexico. He currently lives in Mexico City with his mini schnauzer, Caperucita. While home is now Mexico, he travels extensively, and has lived in Florence, Tennessee, Bangkok, Oahu, New Orleans, and in various cities around Mexico.
He has exhibited all over the United States and Mexico, and his work is carried in stores and galleries around the world. His work has also been published in a variety of magazines and in other formats.