The invasive image. Omnipresent, overhanging, mesmerising. Intruding into the most private part of our lives. Incrusted in the fabric of our imaginations and our dreams, the image casts its veil over the real. This enveloping generates the paradox of a real virtuality, in which the fictiveimage has a concrete effect on lived reality. Hence the multiplication of psychopathologies partaking of the confusion of imaginary worlds with the real. The time for reviving the old opposition of iconoclasm and iconodulia is hopelessly in the past. But the iconocrash produced by the endless repetition, constantly rotated since the inconceivable impact, of the smashing of the two aeroplanes into the two towers on 11 September, hasmerely confirmed in an extreme way the power of media impact experienced in the real, global time of contemporary iconophilia. This radical iconocrash, provoking the destruction of emblems, is only the salient part of an image-making principle which lies at the heart of the functioning of super-modernity. In the face of this profusion generated by media flux, in the face of this global communication whose process is founded on the interaction between transmitter and receiver, art appears lightweight. But while it is true that art lost its iconographic primacy long ago, it has nevertheless retained its power to ask questions about everyday images. An iconoclash, that is to say, a confrontation between regimes of representation that are, a priori, incompatible, and yet that have never stopped influencing each other since the irruption of modernity, and have switched to high speed and permanent exchange since the advent of Pop Art. This is the strategy of critiquing the image by means of the image,consisting in actuating the ordinary image in order to deconstruct the process of symbolisation, by developing a visual device in the physical space of the exhibition.

This is what Pascal Poulain is engaged in doing, through both his installations and his photographs. For his installations, which take into account several of the dimensions in which they are deployed, he draws on a repertoire of images that seems to have been taken from childhood. Thus, he entitled one of his exhibitions "My concrete mixer, your aeroplane, his coach". Here, means of transport were the medium for artistic reflection. A smaller common denominator, therefore, to give a concrete image of the concept of a habitable image, which has been explored in recent years in the fields of architecture ¹ and psychoanalysis ² as well as the new technologies. Philippe Quéau has defined this concept thus : "The notion of the habitable image is an extension of the concept of the virtual image. More precisely, this notion covers the idea of a new stage in the civilisation of the image. After images that we look at (television, cinema) and images that we "read" (computer screens, consoles of all kinds), we are now seeing images that we "inhabit"." ³ Developed in the field of the new technologies, this notion tends to define the true status of the virtual image, an image that authorises an action on and in reality - an augmented reality in which the image is superimposed over the real.
Using simple means, Poulain produces images that are read as signs, or even as signage. While they are designed using computers, their presence in real space is quite concrete and they are made of ordinary material, i.e., coloured or reflective adhesive. Poulain uses the image to create tension in the exhibition space. The vectorial images that he invents model vehicles, reproducing the profiled forms of an airline plane, a truck and a family car. When they are designed on the computer, as in a simulation, these images are designed like models, referring both to the world of toys and to industrial engineering. Enlarged and cut out as stickers, they take the form of logos on the same scale as their model. Like plans articulating the silhouette of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional support. In its compulsive mimetic reference to its object, the image calls into question the space for which, nevertheless, it is intended. As if somehow inappropriate, it has to be contorted in order to fit. Folded to squeeze into the corners of the walls, sometimes stretching all the way to the ceiling and/or the floor, cut or truncated by the corners of the walls, it seeks precision in a site that does not match its suddenly gigantic scale.Poulain uses a visual strategy of hypertrophy. It is like applying to an object Borges? idea of a map on a scale of 1 to 1, which therefore entirely covers its subject. The viewer is contained within a space of an image that is measured on his own physical scale. The sign bursts spectacularly into a space from which it seems to be trying to break free by overflowing it. By trying to break out into the real.

In the society of over-consumption design is with us everywhere and at all times. The alliance of advertising and graphic design has led to a real infiltration of all visual spaces by the economy. The proliferation of desirable consumer images and objects corresponds to the proliferation of technologies of persuasion. Poulain reveals the ambiguity of contemporary visual culture. Rather than letting itself be its passive accomplice, art today must point out what is certainly one of the sources of discontent in our civilisation.