Arbre Magique

As one kind of ‘bonus content’ of my exhibition Sublimine, Arbre Magique is a white lacquered driftwood on which I applied golden leaf on the knots and painted with bright red acrylic on the broken parts, as if they were living flesh. I then created a socket on the trunk and applied two glass eyes and created two golden eyelids with clay, trying to give two expressions: one of awe, the other of placid contemplation.

As in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” where the realm of nature mingles with the human, the organic with the inorganic, flora with fauna, I wanted to create an anthropomorphic trunk that peered from within its wooden soul at its surroundings and the viewer.

This wood, which pendants with the trunk-pedestal of Sofi@, also retrieved from the beach and transformed, is a prototype for a new series I have in mind: driftwoods of various sizes and figures, composed and lacquered in different colors and rendered metamorphic creatures with eyes and small wooden hands, sprouting along their bodies.