" EN SOUS FRANCE "
A Civic Memorial Artwork
" EN SOUS FRANCE "
from Pascal di PÉRI
At the roundabouts of survival and despair, Were born humble yet noble cyclones. These winds of anger, dusted with yellow, Reflected a light that entered History.
WHEN ART WRITES “THE LEGEND OF THE YELLOW VESTS”
FOREWORD
“If art were merely ornament or entertainment, it would not be so essential to us.
From the Sumerians to the 21st century, inspired transcription—decontextualizing a subject and formalizing it through an act of creation—reveals, more or less, and often in its ‘hidden part,’ the source of engagement.
This creative act has always carried meaning, more or less symbolic, more or less explicit.
In painting, sculpture, or architecture, the play of images, the poetic process, expressive subtleties, and the power of allegories—whether hidden or revealed within the work—generate multiple layers of interpretation. Their interferences nourish, and their plastic, speculative, emotional, and philosophical resonances interweave, enriching the whole. The ‘Whole’ then appears greater than the sum of its parts.
Art is indeed an engagement whose purpose is to transcend or reinvent its subject. The artistic adventure—be it aesthetic, conceptual, ideological, or spiritual—stages elements that have always prompted, prefigured, accompanied, or magnified orientations, sometimes transgressive, with socio-civilizational intent.
Art, with a capital ‘A,’ has been and will inevitably be a factor of cultural interventionism, social activism, or interpersonal proselytism.
This principle reaffirms that artists are, consciously or unconsciously, ‘cre-actors’ or ‘artivists’ who, by sketching the essence of causes that underpin their inspiration, work for human progress and the wisdom of enlightened consciousness, as much as for the beauty of the world.”
Pascal di Péri
Although not initially designed to please or adorn walls, these works are necessary for the common good, as they express an imperative inner dynamic. And even if they exalt a form of aesthetic poetry, which at some point might earn them a place on the walls of galleries or museums, their singular essence—more symbolic, more engaged, more resonant—will crystallize metaphorical traces located either at the very core of artistic expression or at the borders of the field of art.
And it is because the coherence and scope of their social nature, as well as the dynamic of their intrinsic energy, carry beams of otherness radiating with potential, that their repercussions can prove vast and profound.
Whether one is attuned to their messages or resistant to their illuminations, art must honor the fact that at certain moments, artists feel the need to bring forth this type of work,
which, more than any other, tells the story of its time. For their sociological impact and visionary projection, by traversing our ‘emotional consciousness,’ will weigh, to some extent, on our reflections and our future.
Description of the work
" EN SOUS FRANCE "
"Beneath France / In Suffering"
This will therefore consist of seven symbolic "volutes":
► The “Volute of the Great National Concord”
► The “Volute of the Epic of Patriotic Resistances”
► The “Volute of the Awakening of the People for the Salvation of the Nation”
► The “Volute of the Fair Sharing of Abundance”
► The “Volute of the Memorial Consciousness of History”
► The “Volute of the Crossroads of Time and Values”
► The “Volute of the Survival of a Beating Chorus of France”
DESCRIPTION OF THE "VOLUTES"
(YOUR STRUGGLES)
These will be large metal structures shaped as cyclonic spirals: double-helix DNA structures (tornado effect – see sketch) covered with a composition made from yellow vests.
These Volutes (structurally similar but not identical in appearance—each possessing its own uniqueness) will seem to rise toward the sky, finding salvation in a vortex movement that expands infinitely.
Their base circle references the roundabouts, the epicenters of the protests. The base radius will be 1711 mm (a reference to November 17, when the Movement began), and the main height will be 5537 mm (thus the work will follow the proportions of the Golden Ratio: Phi). Yellow vests will be decomposed and recomposed on the structure, with the adhesive binding everything together playing a major graphical and symbolic role.
Particularity of the Volutes: they have two very different graphical states depending on the lighting. The first state is visible in daylight (or artificial light), showing the work in a diurnal universe where the colors appear in their most natural state. The second, when installed in deep darkness, illuminated only by sweeping torchlight, reflects the materials and offers a completely different spectacle. This dual potential reading also symbolizes radiant bivalence, arising from the centrifugal and centripetal polarization of this protean Movement. Here lies the essence of a harmonic and complementary balance, that of an ancient symbol implicitly revealed: Yin Yang…
Within this framework, the work radiates beyond the color spectrum, in an iridescent fluorescence. It enters a quasi-metaphysical “dream field” where the “informed void” of the quantum universe of the infinitely small (wave/particle duality) directs the energies of life.
NOTE: Each Volute will, whenever possible, include a sound component. The auditory element (texts – music – sound effects) will be linked to the designation of each Volute. The title of the texts will be: “Là crient Maux” (lacrimo).
" EN SOUS FRANCE "
A citizen-led memorial project
Like an ode to radiant stanzas, this sculptural installation will make our civic heart pulsate with reflective rhythms...
It reflects the confused, complex era we are living in. It reveals the layers of virulent antagonisms that seize our overly individualized futures.
It sketches the spirit of this materialistic, wandering world while suggesting the hypothesis of another path. It is not scandalous to assert that at the helm of states there are now only managers (and promoters) of programmed civilizational decay. A consortium of financial elites has “commodified” the world: we are simultaneously the rowers of the totalitarian galley of a “Black Friday-ized” daily life, and powerless slaves, cast into the gigantic neoliberal slide of globalized civilizational dismantling.
It would undoubtedly be positive for the expression of the ideals of this citizenry in anger to allow and support the installation of this landmark work for the Movement. By rallying to its “Yellow Plumes,” every eye whirling at the heart of its Tornado, while casting a glance along the continuum of our History, would gain a legitimate power of enchantment and national resonance.
" EN SOUS FRANCE "
« Because … »
► Because it has been a long time since such a stubborn determinism has been generated in France. Due to globalized greed, which digs a yawning and indecent socioeconomic chasm between those at the top—the silver-clad “servile valets” of a worldwide finance with more or less opaque networks, a voracious and arrogant “premium oligarchy”—and those at the bottom: the yellow vests of urgency and survival, deprived of guidance and abandoned to the deleterious miasmas of increasingly morbid societies. Also because of a suffocating, deliberately confusing climate, where selfishness, cowardice, abdications, and even compromises have corrupted our era, coating it in a globalizing glue. The quicksands of this financial tar increasingly swallow the particularities of peoples, triggering the ferment of this unprecedented, just citizen anger.
► Because a contemporary artwork can serve a cause or a movement, evoking a polymorphic poetic gaze with transgressive acuity, to inspire awareness, challenge perceptions, bear witness, and account for its time: its characteristics, intentions, struggles, and so on.
► Because a contemporary artwork can instill worthy metaphorical questioning and, beyond mere visual pleasure, provide insightful and relevant aesthetic keys.
► Because a contemporary artwork must also be a source of intrinsic emotional power, and its energetic potential must touch both the symbiotic depths of the “social being” and the psychic layers of the “singular being.”