Dnsep, 2019. Mac, Marseille
Light reveals to us the contours of our environment and accompanies us in the perception we have of the objects around us. I wanted to work from a sandstone object that I modeled, to express the spiritual, meditative and poetic scope of light. This object has no other function than that of revealing the surrounding light. In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
My diploma project revolves around a wish to materialize what is invisible, especially the thoughts and emotions that pass through us. I worked on light in confrontation with another material to evoke this invisibility of inner feeling. In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
My sandstone sculptures are bumpy, irregular but smooth in surfaces, with cavities and folds. Tinted in the mass or covered with a paint supplied with phosphorescent colored pigments, these innocent little statuettes with childlike looks, light up after dark. The statuette stores daily light to become a luminous object in the dark.
In the same way that memories are moments frozen in our minds, light energy comes to fix itself through these objects to resist the darkness. Thus we can notice a difference in the appearance of the medium between a bright and dark environment. This illustrates the permeability of our neurophysiological organism with respect to the surrounding environment. This spontaneous metamorphosis of the object so innocent in broad daylight, whose changing appearance is entirely due to the surrounding light, then refers more to a disturbing ghostly presence.
All this research is the result of a desire to represent the elusive such as the multitude of emotions that run through us and that define who we are.
During one of these nights, the lamp which, over the weeks, had ended up being forgotten, suddenly comes back to life. It lights up; a bright light cuts through the darkness and is projected all around. For a few moments, the forms find a clear cut, the space regains its extension and its limits. The workshop is resuscitated suddenly in all its detail: walls and windows, pallets, trestles, boxes, pipes, everything is there as in broad daylight, but flattened, similar to the image that a flash photograph would fix.
Then the lamp goes out as suddenly as it had come on. The entire scene plunges back into the night without profiles. But something has changed in the meantime. Opacity suffocating and silent, without plane or surface, without depth or distance, where objects were abolished, made way for a composition of lines, thresholds and shadows. In the half-light, certain elements of the scene seem to continue to glow like fireflies. Their shapes float before our eyes to like a retinal persistence effect, captured in the cold glow of moonlight filtering through through the windows.
Elie During, about Boetti's annual Lampada
Tactile light
Contour and shape
