La Ville 1
The installation entitled Ville (City) is a composition of hexagons giving rise to rotating forms of a utilitarian or ornamental nature. These accumulate to form a landscape which like a city viewed from a distance surfaces upward from its centre to organise each receding decrement downward to its extremities.
Why refer to the city? And what is its association with a container or jar?
The reference is more likely to that pivotal point or moment when a civilisation can be seen to organise itself, just as those Mesopotamian cities born out of clay, ground growing into more ground, just as pottery on the wheel will rise ever higher with ever heightened dexterity.
Man, once formed out of the same ground, now elevates himself by the single force of his own technical genius to produce, little by little, what is unnecessary and immaterial.
Hence the jar for containing what was liquid, hitherto untamed, is here given over to concept, containing the void, as well as to the incumbent metaphysical babbling of a whole species.
The same jar, designed first out of pragmatism, the simple need to transport an element from A to B, then became sacred and later an exterior sign of wealth. It had this in common with architecture which, as societies organised themselves into further layers, similarly became an ostentatious instrument of power.
Ville is exploring this same concomitance between two disciplines from the applied arts.
Grégoire Scalabre makes use of it, translated into his own formal language to unfurl an installation that will satisfy even as an exercise in style, accomplished and magnificently so.
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