Dangerous Liaisons by Laclos 

The epistolary novel reimagined as messaging

A contemporary adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos's novel

The letters become messages. The novel becomes a screen. And suddenly, it feels like it was written for this.

Desire, power, seduction, manipulation: Laclos was already describing the mechanisms of a toxic relationship. Today, nothing has changed; except that the drama takes place in your DMs.

With this adaptation, I transform Choderlos de Laclos's famous epistolary novel into a contemporary reading experience designed for the world of smartphones and social media.

In my illustrations, there is no nostalgia: the eighteenth century meets digital culture, chat fiction, and the codes of instant messaging.

Fluid. Instant. Visual.

French · English · Español · 中文 · 日本語 · 한국어

Dangerous Liaisons as Messages, Conversations, and DMs

What if the letters exchanged by Valmont, Merteuil, Tourvel, Cécile, and Danceny had been sent today?

I imagined their exchanges as a digital conversation: letters take the form of instant messages, making visible the seduction games, power dynamics, and manipulation strategies at the heart of the novel.

Every Letter Becomes a Scene. Every Conversation Becomes a Confrontation.

This reading format brings classical literature closer to the contemporary ways we use smartphones and social media, while preserving the dramatic tension of Laclos's original text.

A Queer, Rococo Reinterpretation of the Eighteenth Century

I revisit eighteenth-century aesthetics through an artistic practice shaped by art history, literature, queer theory, and digital culture.

Rococo becomes a visual language for exploring desire, gender, identity, and power dynamics.

I am not trying to reconstruct the past. I shift its codes, confront them with the present, and bring them into a contemporary visual universe.

This encounter between contemporary art, Rococo aesthetics, and classical literature gives Les Liaisons dangereuses a new dimension: queer, digital, and profoundly contemporary.

An Illustrated Literary Experience

I conceive Les Liaisons dangereuses as a work in which text and image are constantly in dialogue.

My illustrations accompany the conversations and give Laclos's characters a new visual universe, somewhere between Rococo aesthetics, digital culture, and contemporary creation.

The image does not simply illustrate the text: it becomes part of its new interpretation.

Why Keep a Classic Under Glass?

For digital natives, discovering eighteenth-century literature can also happen through the forms they use every day: messages, conversations, images, and screens.

Les Liaisons dangereuses was already a story about communication, desire, and power. By changing its medium, I reveal the modernity of its mechanisms.

The letter becomes a DM.

The salon becomes a screen.

The epistolary novel becomes a conversation.

The power games of the eighteenth century suddenly resonate with our present.