Mankind certainly devotes more of its intelligence and knowledge to technical improvements and to the impact of fire arms and weapons of mass destruction than to its own spiritual expansion and the construction of a world turned towards its own blossoming.
No one is prepared to become a victim of a fire arm's barrel. Nor is anyone prepared to face a violent death. Even though the images of fire arm victims follow one another in great succession on screens and in newspapers, these multiple dramatic events belong only to the breakdowns in lives that are different from our own.
"I will go down into the earth and you, you will walk beneath the sun," Rimbaud said to his sister before dying. Death is physically experienced only by the one who is dying, just as he who uses a weapon to kill experiences that in his own way. These two tragic consequences in life – of killing and of dying – can only be shared emotionally by other people. Fire arms seem to be one of the most efficient means, human beings might just as easily use other objects and other means by which to kill or simply to use in self-defense.
This is why for me the urgency consists of dissociating this object of death, identified as the barrel of a gun, from its primary brutality in order to transform it into an object of emotion that could question the fragility of existence, but also the bruises and frustrations of human beings as sources of devastating impulses.
If the view of a barrel can be disturbing, its form here is not embedded in the weapon but is found in an unusual multiplicity of contrasts, colors, lights, and spaces. Thus its visual approach is thereby transformed. The object wants to probe the forms of violence inherent in our existence and the murderous aggressions of the world. Domestic, urban, wartime violence, but also the violence of humans as they inflict it upon themselves.
Thus, freed from its homicidal rigidity that it acquired over time, the pictorial image may appear to convey a new inner energy. Rehabilitated, it extricates itself from the shadows to move into a place of questioning. The archetype is condensed into spiritual energy and is offered as an object of serenity.
It is my intention to lead the viewer to a state of awareness, so that the new symbolism connected to a process of introspection will cause his apprehension to topple and, instead, be led towards an inspiration.
In its somberness, the barrel can make room for contemplation so that the anxiety of the viewer, beyond his comprehension and knowledge, is revealed in a kind of tranquility of self, locking away his remembrance of murders and bringing his feelings gently towards a power of well-being.
Strangely, the contour of the barrel's structure is modeled on that of the cathedral's rose windows and also that of mandalas, which is why the latter can be incarnated into a kind of "Rose Window" or a "Mandala of the Transcendence of Death."
An object of reconciliation, which implies an awareness of the isolation of human beings withdrawn from the rest of the world, through the stigmata of victimization, opens up to the personal vision of the one looking so that (s)he reaches an osmosis – leading the whole towards the One.
A barrel of the Concorde could open out onto the path of unity of self towards others.
