1991 Galerie R.Treger PARIS (FR)

The Sceptre and the Orb – late 20th century

The scepter and the orb, once bearers of a sacred order linking humans to something greater than themselves, are here stripped of their spiritual dimension. Ancestral symbols of power, they are here reinterpreted with a deliberately ironic distance. Once attributes of benevolent sovereignty, they become at the end of the 20th century the vestiges of a corrupt authority that we continue, paradoxically, to sacralize.

Through derision, I highlight the absurdity of our voluntary submission to structures that promise order and prosperity, while nurturing imbalances and alienation. These objects of power thus become mirrors: they reflect less a legitimate authority than a blind belief in systems that escape us.
These sculptures question the collective madness that consists in putting our sovereignty into the hands of an opaque and corrupt system, where profit is set up as a supreme value, relegating the human to the rank of adjustment variable. The scepter no longer guides, it imposes; the orb no longer protects the world, it encompasses and stifles it. They embody a world that has replaced the quest for meaning with accumulation, and inner sovereignty with material domination. By elevating profit to absolute, our society has entrusted its power to systems that nurture the illusion of security while impoverishing the soul.

If therefore these 2 red and gold works denounce the reduction of existence to its mere market value, they question this fascination for matter (physical density), which has become an end in itself, at the expense of the human, the living and the spiritual. The scepter no longer rises, the orb no longer connects: they freeze. I propose an invitation to step back, or even renunciation. An invitation to remember that true sovereignty is not over the world, but first over oneself.

                                                                Sceptre – end of the 20th century

                                                                Plexi glass box on white background

                                                                  Orbe – end of the 20th century

                                                                           Plexi glass box