No tears for the creatures of the night

Berger&Berger, 2017
Concrete blocks, LED sources, speakers, sound system, pedestals. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artists
Stèle 200 (Marta Pan) 1992, bronze, 200 x 20 x 8 cm ; Artist collection and after Fondation Marta Pan - André Wogenscky collection
Sans titre (André Bloc) circa 1955, cement, 130 x 42 x 49 cm ; Natalie Seroussi Collection
Hommage à Brown (Etienne-Martin) 1988-1990, painted ash wood, 188 x 70 x 50 cm ; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon collection

Floating worlds, Biennale de Lyon 2017
curator: Emma Lavigne

Performed by: Frédéric Fisbach (actor)
Collaborators: Théo Vachon (architect), Guillaume Couturier (sound engineer) With technical support from Roosens Bétons and MOOS Licht.
With support from Solo Galerie, the Fondation Marta Pan - André Wogenscky, Natalie Seroussi, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Les Editions de Minuit and Catherine Robbe-Grillet.

No tears for the creature of the night, a system for theatre or museum, simultaneously links sound broadcast of a literary creation, a piece of architecture, furniture, a light environment, sculptures, pedestals, and an audience. In other words, a new version of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Secret Room, performed by actor-director Frédéric Fisbach, mineral surroundings, walls made of concrete blocks, circular benches, three modern sculptures, LED sources, an audience. La chambre secrète, The Secret Room published in 1962 in Instantanés (Editions de Minuit), was a commissioned piece of writing. It is a short story inspired by a painting chosen by the author. Robbe-Grillet imagines a painting by Gustave Moreau that never existed. The text, constructed in three parts like a Lied-Sonata, is reminiscent of the leitmotifs that Berg used in Wozzeck. An introduction symmetrically aligned to the Conclusion. The “circulating” central part that dislocates the symmetry. Three “fields” of substances (of differing energy weights) both acted and revealed by the structure of the piece. Sinusoidal dynamics, the times are sometimes below, sometimes beyond a vertical axis - it is a vertical time, a sine tilted a quarter of a circle with respect to its classical representation. Suspended time. No tears for the creature of the night is also a piece of architecture. It is a new variation of architect Aldo Van Eyck’s plans for the Sonsbeek Pavilion, a temporary pavilion, built in 1966 in Sonsbeek park in Arnhem. It was an ’open-air’ museum designed to host thirty sculptures by artists who included Hans Arp, Alberto Giacometti, and Constantin Brancusi. It was destroyed a few months after its creation and rebuilt in 2006 in the garden of the Kröller-Müller museum in Hoenderloo.
Three sculptures are associated here:
Stèle 200, a bronze sculpture by Marta Pan. Marta Pan worked with three types of abstract forms: some were simple, dynamic forms, others were articulated, while the others had an invisible point of equilibrium, on which two elements of different shape and mass pivoted. She settled in Paris in 1947, where she met Brancusi in his studio in the Impasse Ronsin. After Brancusi, she met Le Corbusier in his studio and the architect André Wogenscky, his studio assistant who eventually became her husband and artistic partner. Fascinated by the relationship between architecture and sculpture, she gave concrete form to the relationship in works for public space. Her first floating sculpture was created for the Kröller-Müller museum. After that, Marta Pan produced many monumental sculptures to go with architecture for public and urban spaces
Untitled, sculpture by André Bloc. This sculpture is from the garden of the Bellevue house at Meudon, the villa studio where the artist lived and worked. It was built between 1949 and 1952. Designed by André Bloc in Bellevue, it is built of concrete, stone and glass. Architecture, decoration, furniture, sculpture and landscape are all of a piece. The land, on which the dwelling house was built, slopes steeply to the north, giving great views of the valley of the Seine.
Etienne-Martin’s Hommage à Brown combines the form of a totem borrowed from other civilizations, with painted surfaces characteristic of modern sculpture. Etienne Martin, along with the architect Bernard Zehrfuss, was one of the ’Oppède Groupe’, a community of artists from various backgrounds: architects, painters, sculptors, musicians and even an organ builder.

The whole work is lit in various ways, creating a gradient from 600 lux – 50 lux. The spectrum between these two values constitutes the many conditions for lighting works in a museum: from sculpture to drawing on paper, simulating daylight, from light to darkness.