The Agenda

Through painting, sculpture, and writing, Quentin Piel Langlet develops a visual practice based on the principle of collage, both in form and in source material. Drawing from image banks he fully integrates digital tools into his process, adopting the same production codes used by masculinist and conspiracy-driven influencers observed on X or Instagram, figures whose visual strategies he questions and subverts. His work is rooted in narratives inspired by contemporary anti-queer myths, such as the so-called “gay agenda,” a conspiracy theory claiming that LGBTQIA+ people seek to dominate the world with the support of elites and the entertainment industry. To these paranoid fictions, he adds intimate and ambivalent experiences marked by tension between the desire to conform and the need to break away from heteronormative and virilist norms. In doing so, he exposes the violence of gender injunctions and the narratives that sustain them. Humor, satire, and exaggeration become tools for critical reversal: by pushing these myths to the extreme, the artist reveals their fictional and fantastical nature. The grotesque here acts as a revealer of a reactionary imaginary, often more comical than coherent. The objects featured in his works, anal enema pear, chastity cages, glory holes, become protagonists in a queer theatre. Diverted from their original use, they embody archaic fears of emasculation at the root of many queerphobic narratives, while asserting an alternative storytelling drawn from queer cultures. The meticulousness of his gesture, the richness of detail, and the care given to each piece represent forms of resistance to the injunction to be productive. Rooted in a logic of slowing down, his work embraces a meditative relationship to time, in opposition to the rhythms imposed by performance-driven capitalism. Quentin Piel Langlet’s works invite viewers to confront normative imaginaries in order to dismantle them. Through irony, he opens a critical space for alternative narratives of gender, desire, and power.