In this book, Jean-Jacques Ringuette offers a photographic series in which he himself interprets, in the guise of a clown character, multiple playlets as caustic as they are comical. Ringuette, whose approach revolves around the notion of incarnation and its impact on the concept of identity, explores a long tradition of self-representation of the artist as a clown. Inspired by the iconography of the circus and carnivals, his sober but highly sophisticated stagings evoke the existential journey from the world of childhood to that of the adult world, as well as the various states and attitudes that the psyche adopts in its current frequentation of the world.

" Questioning the notion of the self as a stable essence and the viability of the roles attributed to masculinity by the dominant cultural order, the photographs in Figures of the Masquerade elaborate a narrative sequence that imposes a sequence on the denial and abjection of the body, on oedipal desire as well as queer desire and identity."

Penny Cousineau-Levine