Dumas is known for highly contested subjects. However, probably the most scandalous theme in her art is childhood, embodied by the artist's merciless depictions of children.
Dumas portrays children as distorted, uncanny and discomforting creatures. The prevalent feeling embodied in those works is fear, and it is the fear of nothing else but babies. To see your own offspring as a parasite might seem outrageous to most of people but not to Dumas. The artist, despite also being a mother, does not restrain from using her own children as models for her, at the very least, ambivalent works. She exposes the monstrous, and deeply suppressed by most adults, nature of children and replaces their presumed innocence with something disturbing.
But these sometimes horrifying depictions have much more to offer than just the shock value. They allow us to question something that before seemed unquestionable - our conventions of parenthood versus reality.
“ No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of — the pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not. „