Combler le vide
- Éric SAUVÉ
My work often begins with a material. Taken with its particular mix of properties, its idiosyncracies and possibilities, I’ll shape it, accumulate it, recontextualize it, until the ideas and emotion emerging from the process overshadow the material with which it began.
This installation began with an exploration of styrofoam. I was attracted by its mix of ubiquity and invisibility, of frailty and durability, and like many engineered materials, sophisticated processes at the service of humble ends.
The elements assembled here offer a shifting play of plenitude and emptiness, of container, content, and contentment. In a place of deliberate uncertainty, the viewer can experience the energy of ambivalence, can find the piles of pallets playful or cagelike, see the maquette as utopia or graveyard, and is invited, perhaps compelled, to fill in the blanks.
