Petit Théâtre de l'Éther
There are moments when sculpture ceases to describe the world and begins to alter the conditions under which it can be imagined.
Petit Théâtre de l'Éther inhabits such a moment.
This files presents photographs of four of the twelve sculptures planned for the installation. The images were taken in the studio immediately after completion, documenting the works within their place of production before their first public presentation in the Arsenal. The remaining eight sculptures are currently in progress.
The installation is composed of twelve vertical figures (160 cm to 180 cm). Each begins with a life-sized sculpted head, coated in limewash , and continues into a raw wooden staff, extending the human body into something at once ceremonial, fragile and unfamiliar.
They evoke neither identifiable characters nor established mythologies. Instead, they seem to emerge from a place where memory, dream, ritual and play have not yet separated into distinct realms.
Carved and assembled with limewash, pigments, feathers, recycled fur, paper and salvaged materials, the sculptures preserve the evidence of their own making. Their modest means are never concealed. On the contrary, each joint, each surface and each imperfection becomes part of the work's expressive force. What appears vulnerable acquires unexpected authority.
Distributed throughout the space, the figures occupy it without claiming it. Fine metal supports lift them almost imperceptibly away from the architecture, recalling the threads of marionettes while refusing the illusion of movement. Their stillness is active. Each sculpture exists in relation to the others, generating an invisible network of tensions, intervals and echoes that no single viewpoint can fully contain.
The installation proposes no fixed narrative and no closed symbolic system. It offers a landscape of possibilities in which meaning remains mobile, shaped by the movement of the viewer as much as by the disposition of the figures themselves.
Each presence may be read in multiple ways: as antenna, sceptre, ritual implement, guardian, puppet, messenger or witness. None of these identities settles into certainty. Rather than representing invisible forces, the sculptures appear to register their passage, as though making perceptible the subtle currents that bind bodies, memories and places together.
The ether invoked by the title is not conceived as a scientific substance but as a poetic hypothesis: an immaterial field where memory, imagination and transmission circulate beyond the limits of the visible. It names the possibility that every existence exceeds its own boundaries and remains quietly entangled with others.
Without quoting any particular tradition, the installation draws upon forms that recur across cultures: sacred objects, vernacular sculpture, theatre, children's games, ritual artefacts and the enduring structures of myth. These references never become illustrations. They return instead as distant recognitions, as though recovered from a dream whose origins can no longer be located. Humour accompanies solemnity; tenderness coexists with mystery. The work leaves enough space for each visitor to compose their own constellation of meanings.
These twelve figures neither proclaim beliefs nor deliver answers. They remain available.
Like fragments of an unfinished constellation, they invite us to recognise, within their strangeness, something long familiar: the intuition that every individual existence belongs to a choreography larger than itself, unfolding across earthly and celestial scales.
Ultimately, Petit Théâtre de l'Éther unfolds as an interior theatre without actors, where sculpture no longer asks simply to be contemplated but to be inhabited. Matter becomes porous to imagination. Silence acquires its own language. The visible opens onto what cannot be seen, yet continues to shape the ways we inhabit the world.
