The artwork Tectonies was created for the exhibition Sculpture Infinie: From Antique Molding to 3D Scanning, showcased successively at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.
It is primarily based on the representation of Greco-Roman elements such as the Omphalos of Delphi and the Roman Pinecone. The work features ornamental systems inspired by stylized vegetal and organic structures. For example, a honeycomb structure or the representation of a uterus, inspired by an Etruscan votive offering, as well as an Art Nouveau motif synthesizing floral and vegetal patterns, and a fragment of a caryatid. The golden patinas applied to the background of the molds generate a bronze coating with multiple shades. The use of golden tones applied to the monumental sculpture is inspired by ancient chryselephantine monumental sculptures, the most famous but now lost being probably the Athena statue that was in the Parthenon temple, whose ivory structure was covered with gold plates. The temple itself was built to house the goddess's sculpture. Tectonies is composed of imprints from ten different molds, ten sequences, which are assembled on two vertical axes in a game of permutations.
"Theoretically, I was inspired by a reading of Rémi Labrusse in Gradhiva: Journal of Anthropology and Art History, on the opposition between the materialistic vision of Gottfried Semper: ‘(...) the essence of architecture is not the building but the dressing. The vegetal ornament intervenes when the ephemeral ornaments used for ancient festivities (garlands, wreaths, trophy ribbons, etc.) that adorned the scaffolding were transformed into lasting elements’ and the idealistic vision of Karl Bötticher, a 19th-century architecture and archaeology theorist: ‘Tectonics is based on the idea of an ornamental grammar. It leads to a revolutionary definition of construction, that is, of oneself and the properties induced by nature, following a law of infinite reflexivity.’" - Marion Verboom
Presented by Galerie Lelong & Co.
The sculpture is located in front of the Banque de Luxembourg, at the corner of Boulevard Royal and Avenue Émile Reuter.
