FOCUS TUILERIES

sphère de jeu gonflable contient un lustre à pampilles maintenu en l’air et mis en rotation par un moteur de scooter électrique. En faisant tourner à toute vitesse le luminaire sur lui-même, l’artiste le sort de son immobilité pour en révéler une seconde forme, telle une anamorphose produite par son mouvement centrifuge. De la même manière, en se percutant les unes aux autres, les pampilles se détruisent mutuellement et génèrent par instants de violents bruits de verres cassés. Aux miroitements incessants du lustre en folie se conjugue le surgissement de sa possible musicalité, à la fois déployée et assourdie par la bulle en plastique qui fait caisse de résonance. Une expérience à la fois visuelle et sonore, de suspension et d’agitation. Printers, neon tubes, cables, pneumatic jacks, air conditioner compressors, freeze compressors… Vivien Roubaud scoured dumps to salvage these machines and other objects with which he creates a language, spoken with the materials of our times distinguished by their planned obsolescence. His experimental lab practice consists of revealing the internal mechanisms of these castoffs and giving them a new life by subverting their original function. Rearranged, hybridized and made completely unproductive, their former purpose left behind, their potential energy is liberated. Take, for instance, his sculpture in the Tuileries gardens. Floating above a fountain basin is an immense inflatable children’s ball containing a cut-glass chandelier kept rotating in the air by an electric motor scooter engine. Rotating rapidly on its own axis, the lamp ceases to be immobile and a second form is revealed, like an anamorphosis produced by centrifugal motion. Similarly, the cutglass crystals crash into one another in an orgy of mutual destruction, occasionally generating the violent clamor of shattering glass. The continual mutual reflections of these teardrops gone mad combine with their nowfreed potential for music. The sound both fills and is muffled by the plastic ball, now fulfilling its potential as resonance box. The experience is both visual and auditory, a mix of suspension and hubbub.

Translation, L-S Torgoff