Histoire

helicopter blade, architect's pencil
160 × 25 × 10 cm

Apocalypse and History, two works juxtaposed, include measuring tools. The conductor's baton sets the tempo of the music, and the architect's pencil sketches the dimensions of a space. These tools are associated with large and small helicopter blades that echo the centrifugal force of a cyclone. Presented here dismantled from their rotors, they are metaphors for the hour and minute hands torn from their clock. The titles also refer to narratives: the grand history of Mankind and the myth of the Apocalypse, the end of times. For Evariste Richer, the two pieces resonate with the history of art: from Dante's circles of Hell to Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now.

History is like geology: it adds layers or strata of narratives that settle over time, like furrows. In its acceleration, it can also generate accidents, ruins, or amnesia. Paul Virilio thus speaks of the effects of the compression of space-time: "One day, the space-time of the world will be nothing because we will have lost the extension and duration of the world due to speed. We will not have been content to gain time to travel from one point to another, but we will have especially lost the space-time of the world because it will have become too small for the new technologies. There is a considerable symbolic loss phenomenon here.* "