Temps imparti & paysages (2000)

With “Allotted Time,” artist Jean-Bernard Métais invites us, as he puts it, to slow down “our big time” and be attentive to the “now, eternal now” within ourselves. With this sand landscape in perpetual renewal, which he created for the Expo 2000 World Fair in Hanover, he aspires to no less than opening a window for us into the unity of another living world, a world he created and experimented with - and at the same time, he invites us to slow down our own time.  In sum, it’s the gift of time, the gift of self, that Métais proposes we experience through his works in sand, for these works called “Allotted Time” are not just hourglasses, but time traps, invitations to enter the world of the present and perhaps get a peek at that “present of the present” Saint Augustine spoke of in his Confessions.
Jacques Brosse, "Temps présent" a Hanovre, 2000. Writer and naturalist, awarded the grand prize in literature by the Académie Française.