In this darkly comic and visually charged series, Ottawa artist Claude MarQuis re-imagines Satan not as a theological threat but as a contemporary celebrity — a touring entertainer, a cultural brand, a franchise in need of better marketing. Inspired by the mythographic writings of Barbara G. Walker, who examined the devil as a construction of patriarchal religious power rather than a genuine supernatural menace, MarQuis raids the visual language of commercial posters, concert bills, and entertainment advertising to reframe evil as showbiz.

​

The Satan Series (2001) is built on painted portraits — real models transformed through iconography into Lucifer, the Antichrist, le Diable. Satan hosts a magic show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, his program listing fireballs, levitation, a woman sawn in half, and torture. The Antichrist announces a world tour with stops in Rome, Moscow, New York, Tokyo, and Delhi — tickets available through Ticketmaster, naturally. Le Diable headlines a striptease at a Montreal bathhouse. Lucifer plays a single, unmissable appearance at Place des Arts. For the truly devoted, an invitation-only Orgie at a lieu secret — no address given, just a phone number. Hell has a velvet rope.

​

Not all works in the series are poster-format. A luminous red nude with horns reclines in a brooding autumn landscape, tender and melancholy rather than menacing — now in the permanent collection of the Ottawa Art Gallery, acquired through The Grotto: The Bill Staubi Collection. A monumental 60×80 inch canvas fractures a top-hatted figure across a Mondrian-like grid of blazing red panels, identity multiplied and corporate, Satan as an army of one. One painting shows a contemporary young man sitting quietly in a front yard, barely-there horns the only sign that something is off.

​

The series was exhibited at the Alliance Française Ottawa as part of the Jeux de la Francophonie.