Gilles Brusset © Pierre-Yves Brunaud
Optical illusion at the hortillonnages – The artistic project installs a series of mirages, a retraction of reality, kaleidoscopic games. Intrigued, we start by seeing a sort of slight shift in the landscape, as if one image was sliding over another. The light colonizes the material, 1000 reflections settle and dig gaps through which the gaze and the imagination are engulfed. The sculpture is a magical portal that opens onto the archipelago of gardens. Inside, when we enter under and in the sculpture, we have the experience of a labyrinth of mirrors, an aviary of light or a cage of reflections whose exit is not always obvious.
Nature and culture – Between nature – preserved, idealized and restored – and us, the sculpture. To cross the perceptive airlock of the sculptures is to go on a journey in a proliferating and shimmering self-stable structure which seems to come out of the ground. Floating geometries seem to emerge from the texture of the landscape: these are appearances that represent an ongoing process: the invasion of the Alpine archipelago by structures. Is it a crystallization process? Is it a single rhizomatous organism or one with underground hyphae of which we will only see emergences here and there?
Imagery and picturesque – At one point, the optical illusion occurs, the landscape is transformed into an image. By visual perception, by optical illusion, we no longer differentiate between what is a reflection and what is seen by the direct impression of light on the retina. Framed by mirrors, the landscape becomes a reflection of itself, an image.
Diffraction and illusion – The work escapes its status as an object. She appears like a mirage in the garden. The sculpture tapers to its contours and blends into the landscape. We cannot detach it from its context, we no longer know how to detach the form from the background. More surprisingly, we will see the landscape itself dissolve, be sucked into it. With the meshes of their net, the structures of the sculpture pull the landscape of the garden towards them.
In the air, the mixture of the three-dimensional orthogonal framework of the sculpture with the picturesque undulations of the gardens of the alpine hortillonnages provokes an optical reaction, a formal combustion.
The artist
Gilles Brusset
