Florence Doléac

TAC TIC

2006

Show in two parts

An in situ installation and a bibliographic projection

Carpet, marble pebbles, Led light, Patapouf seats, video

On entering, visitors are invited to experience sensory destabilization: inside or out? Free or imprisoned? The floor, covered with a thick sienna-coloured carpet, absorbs visitors’ footsteps; small white pebbles scattered here and there find their way into the pile of the carpet, constricting the soles of the feet, and scrambling the logic of assimilated inside/outside codes . In the middle of the space, a mountain of these little pebbles forms a large pile or mineral ottoman, on which everyone is prompted to put themselves. Whether seated or lying down, all that remains for spectators to do is contemplate, from this central point, the walls surrounding them, decorated with a kind of luminous, two-edged wallpaper. Regularly spaced stripes, echoing those made by the bars of a cage, embellish the wall like wallpaper for a child’s bedroom. As they lick at the walls, these lasers open the space and close it back up again in the same stroke. Visitors thus find themselves in a state of strange destabilization that is very hard to put a finger on; somewhere between the well-being of a zen moment of mineral relaxation and luminous pressure enclosing it and virtually but literally caging it. In the parallel space, a bibliographical exhibition will be projected onto a screen, like silent snap shots, overlaid on the soporific rhythm of the beating of a slumbering heart. Here, visitors are invited to wallow in this cosy home-movie on Patapouf seats for as long as the projection takes, or, if they feel the need, for the duration of a restorative little siesta.

Florence Doléac sets her work in an interstitial space where design hobnobs with art, and where presentation and production methods waver between a system that is both commercial and institutional. The fact that she lays claim to this not very common stance endows her with a specific identity. The fact is that not only does Florence Doléac introduce a tension between production and exhibition, with answers that brim with wit and poetry, but she also develops a line of questioning about function and its contrasting counterpart: uselessness. Her proposals and ideas sidestep established codes in order to upset the way we usually perceive things; she intercepts our gestures by putting a finger on their limits. The incongruousness of the various situations thus created refers us to our own imagination, thus lightening a reality that is far too straitjacketed.