In condemning the eroticism, Christianity propitiated that the lubricious imagination concentrate in hell, making it the sky of the sinners, the paradise of lust. Artists of all the times have been filling the underworld by all kinds of paraphilias, apparently to damn them but in practice to satisfy the scoptophilic appetite of their patrons or clients.
But the confessed anticlericalism is not embodied in art (literature first) until the eighteenth century, when dissident artists release their writings and erotic illustrations with the intent to ridicule ecclesiastical and monarchic elites. The figure of Sade is forged in this pre-revolutionary context, but the truth is that he had little interest in his contemporaries egalitarian proclamations (he himself belonged to the aristocratic class of the Ancien Régim), but to jeopardise the foundations of civilization moving to the sexual sphere the barbarism of his time.
Clovis Trouille painting continues this irreverent tradition against the established order, using sexuality as a tool to denounce the decline of religious and military powers. Thus, the profanation of churches and sacred objects by indencent acts, the profusion of lewd priests, necrophiliac missionaries, voluptuous nuns, cardinals wearing leagues blessing scenes of war and death, shameful confessions … constitute much of the production of this French painter whose satirical vein against the homeland and honor forged after having served their country in the First World War.
Another aspect of his biography, more decisive in the formation of his artistic language, was having worked for years in a factory that manufactured dolls for Grevin Wax Museum, also mannequins for travelling funfairs and shop window displays. The carny paraphernalia is manifest everywhere: fortune-tellers, lifter of weights, trapeze artists swinging on broomsticks on the Paris Metro entrances, peep shows dedicated to “over 50”, sailors and military drunk while strippers are preparing their performances … Or Trouille portrayed himself as a necromancer, under whose magic wand gives life to sensual vampire dolls.
The Paris Belle Epoque underworld appear transmuted by the bizarre imagination of an artist that if he had been film director would have delighted the fans of series B, as mixture of sexploitation and horror genres, comedy and innocence kitsch .
Admired by the surreal group but outgroup both gregarious and elitist spirit of the avant-garde, he preferred to maintain its independence as a Sunday painter (in the spare time his job as a makeup mannequins left him) demonstrating a direct, anti-intellectual, of spicy popular postcard, anticipating for decades the rise of low art.