We are capable of identifying any object at first glance. Regardless of the orientation of what we see, it is rare that we do not attach a word to it within a few hundredths of a second. It is almost as though seeing a part entails seeing the whole: when we catch sight of a horse’s hoof, our mind has already conjured up the image of the animal towering above it. A kind of permanent conceptual mise en abyme seems to inhabit our perception of the world. As though the architecture of this perception were designed like a fractal, endlessly reshaping itself. Each fragment of reality could be a mirror of its totality.
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One idea partly corresponds to these reflections: the monad. This concept, dear to the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, is the starting point for this series of works created using small stamps carved into linoleum.
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However, once the eye has completed its task, the mind never ceases to project onto the visible world a second reading, saturated with concepts and associations.
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The idea of a “car,” forged over the course of our lives, will immediately attach itself to the bodywork of a Peugeot 504 when we catch sight of one in the street. The 1970s may follow, as may the Meadows Report, for those of us with a nostalgic bent. This report, drawn up in 1972 by the Club of Rome, was already warning of the consequences of human activity in industrialized societies.
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The production of objects and agricultural activities are described there as sources of an impending climate disruption. The need to transition towards another model of society is advocated.
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Yet, more than fifty years later, nothing has been done, or so little. The world is covered with the vestiges of what this self-consuming model has produced.
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All manufactured objects and the residues of their production have now become part of our environments.
They have gone so far as to contaminate our bodies and our conscious relationship with the world.