Chambre d'éclipse - Donjon de Vez (2002)

A strange and imposing silver vessel stands there, like a model rocket. You enter from the side and find yourself in the dark, where you discover the disk of the sun through the black screen before you. Masked with solar filters, this “eclipse chamber” makes it possible to look straight at the sun – at any moment of the day, without burning your eyes – and hence, to discover its perfection. Excepting the day of the eclipse, it inverts the image of a black Sun by revealing a white disk on a black background: an abstract work that could have attracted the attention of certain characters in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. The chamber has been aligned in the path of the solar eclipse that will occur on August 11 at 12:25 pm. When he was a child, in 1961, Jean-Bernard Métais witnessed “the sun’s disappearance in broad daylight” for the first time; since then, he has been using his work to raise the question of time’s fragility faced with the cosmos. This particular piece also serves as a somewhat more prosaic reminder that adequate eye protection is absolutely necessary while observing the eclipse.

Text by Laurent LEBON, Exhibition Commissary



Exposition  collective  «1,2,3 soleil» avec:  Marc COUTURIER, Pascal CRIBIER, Jacqueline DAURIAC, Malachi FARRELL, Markus HANSEN, Bertrand LAVIER, Jean Bernard METAIS, François MORELLET, Jean-Pierre RAYNAUD, Felice VARINI.