La petite fille aux papillons / David Mesguich
Square Roosevelt - From May 2019
Monumental sculpture
Project: Monumental sculpture representing a little girl kneeling, with butterflies fluttering around her. She is holding a pair of scissors in her hands and she is breaking it.
David Mesguich, an internationally renowned French artist delivers a monumental work of art full of poetry, based on the saying “to have butterflies in the stomach.” He is questioning the borders, the limits and their artefacts that constrain the freedom of movement in the public space. David travels through towns and develops an atypical cartography by focusing his interest on everything that separates and divides in these transit spaces.
The artist takes back ownership of some parts of these aseptic territories through his monumental sculptures and his drawings. David Mesguich’s first place of creation is numbers, alone in the immensity of code, he draws the first stages of these subjects. His sculptures will find life through the meeting between technical 3-D imagery and traditional modelling. The artist is fascinated by polygonal aesthetics, an element of the language of glitch art, the video games of the 80s and 90s, as well as by the dramaturgy of baroque art. He questions the place of man in the urban environment as a space of partitioning, separation, crossing. These conditioned places, made up of multiple markings and signs that compartmentalise and restrict both freedom of movement and freedom of thought. The sculptures question the human condition by transiting obsessively between real and numerical, between public places and non-places, between legal and illegal, between past and future.
“La petite fille aux papillons” (The little girl with butterflies): “One day someone told me that when you fall in love you get butterflies in your stomach, I have always found this an amusing image whereas I myself didn’t feel things this way, nevertheless I have always kept this image in a corner of my mind.
Later on, I came across a painting that illustrated two people each holding the same heart in one hand and in the other hand a pair of scissors, as if to give an ultimatum: who will be the first to cut the heart? In the end I believe that I didn’t like this painting and even less the inevitable aspect that was implied, and yet it fascinated me for a long time and I also photographed it in a corner of my mind. Then I became a father and I remembered these moments where love could fail. I thought that I didn’t want my child to suffer such a situation one day and I wanted to do something that would mean exactly the opposite. It was at that moment that an image of my daughter Lucie surrounded by butterflies, breaking a pair of
scissors came to mind, broken scissors so that the wings could never be cut. At a time where everything is fragile and fleeting this sculpture is a symbol of resistance and duration; it is not enough to hope, you have to decide.” David Mesguich
Monumental sculpture
Project: Monumental sculpture representing a little girl kneeling, with butterflies fluttering around her. She is holding a pair of scissors in her hands and she is breaking it.
David Mesguich, an internationally renowned French artist delivers a monumental work of art full of poetry, based on the saying “to have butterflies in the stomach.” He is questioning the borders, the limits and their artefacts that constrain the freedom of movement in the public space. David travels through towns and develops an atypical cartography by focusing his interest on everything that separates and divides in these transit spaces.
The artist takes back ownership of some parts of these aseptic territories through his monumental sculptures and his drawings. David Mesguich’s first place of creation is numbers, alone in the immensity of code, he draws the first stages of these subjects. His sculptures will find life through the meeting between technical 3-D imagery and traditional modelling. The artist is fascinated by polygonal aesthetics, an element of the language of glitch art, the video games of the 80s and 90s, as well as by the dramaturgy of baroque art. He questions the place of man in the urban environment as a space of partitioning, separation, crossing. These conditioned places, made up of multiple markings and signs that compartmentalise and restrict both freedom of movement and freedom of thought. The sculptures question the human condition by transiting obsessively between real and numerical, between public places and non-places, between legal and illegal, between past and future.
“La petite fille aux papillons” (The little girl with butterflies): “One day someone told me that when you fall in love you get butterflies in your stomach, I have always found this an amusing image whereas I myself didn’t feel things this way, nevertheless I have always kept this image in a corner of my mind.
Later on, I came across a painting that illustrated two people each holding the same heart in one hand and in the other hand a pair of scissors, as if to give an ultimatum: who will be the first to cut the heart? In the end I believe that I didn’t like this painting and even less the inevitable aspect that was implied, and yet it fascinated me for a long time and I also photographed it in a corner of my mind. Then I became a father and I remembered these moments where love could fail. I thought that I didn’t want my child to suffer such a situation one day and I wanted to do something that would mean exactly the opposite. It was at that moment that an image of my daughter Lucie surrounded by butterflies, breaking a pair of
scissors came to mind, broken scissors so that the wings could never be cut. At a time where everything is fragile and fleeting this sculpture is a symbol of resistance and duration; it is not enough to hope, you have to decide.” David Mesguich
