ABOUT "VARIATIONS IN VARIATIONS"

For the past ten years, Damien Bénéteau has been developing a series of sculptures, Variations, which which make tangible the ordinarily imperceptible forces which govern our universe. Each consists of a mechanical, kinetic and optical device which allows the human perception to seize the flow of time and the cyclical structure of the universe. Launched in a pendulum movement, a ball crosses at regular intervals a pierced plate, perpendicular to its plane of oscillation. The minimalism of the volumes, the abstraction of the the coldness of the metal and the slowness of the rhythm form together a microcosm reduced to like a star reduced to its most elementary physical dimension. Each Variation reflects its play of light and shadow in the immediate environment and seeks to the eye towards a quasi meditative state. This work evolves today towards forms more immersive forms, more technical and of greater scale, with it affirms the influence of the kinetic art and of the op'art on his work. From the first, he retains the idea that movement is a medium in itself, generator of forms to whole shares, of the second, the idea that a play of optics is capable of redraw the world. For his project at the Vasarely Foundation, Damien Bénéteau takes up the form of the pendulum, thought out on the scale of a building, a the scale of a building, in the image of Foucault's pendulum in the Pantheon. Fixed to the ceiling, at a height of 11 meters the installation rests on the same principle as the Variations: a sphere in movement crosses an imposing a sphere in movement crosses an imposing plate of metal posed with the vertical one, cut in all its height and illuminated from its interior edge. Treated in the mass, it presents two surfaces leaned the other - one side matt, the other silver - even if the ball, of a black without brilliance, does not produce a mirror effect effect and leaves Vasarely's works intact around it. Unlike Foucault's pendulum Foucault's pendulum, its movement is not correlated with the rotation of the Earth. A magnetic device, autonomous, engages it in a manifestly infinite pendulum movement. The plasticity of the movement, its capacity to sculpt forms in the matter as in the perception, is manifested then with force, and in a certain nakedness. When it crosses the plate, the ball sees indeed its reliefs remodeled by the light, which animates its volume and makes its contours more prominent. Its movement makes its features appear, the kinetic sensation is transformed into visual perception. At their point of coincidence, the ball and the plate, aligned on the same axis vertically, draw even a composition falsely composition falsely flat, that a front viewer can furtively grasp as two-dimensional. The plastic becomes graphic, the sculpture becomes a painting or a drawing. In this installation, the interaction between movement, volume and light creates an environment environment marked by its depth, its mystery and a certain solemnity. The slow and regular oscillation of the mobile sculpture is inscribed in a temporal loop which calls upon the image of the metronome or of a chronometric measuring instrument. Without yielding to the ludic, nor to the spectacular, the installation gives to see in all its simplicity the common deployment of time and of space. It concentrates particularly the attention on the dilation of the duration, sensitizing as much to the time historically lived, in conscience, that to the time as physical and perceptivo-cognitive phenomenon. Variations in Variations ends up being read as a poetic interpretation of the gravity revealed in the "aîon", a suspended and stretched present which is replayed here with the infinity.