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Strulpture

an introduction

Strulptures creat chinks, apertures small empty spaces in a substance or in between elements : the purpose here is to determine their capacity to remain open to other spaces that are not immediately perceptible. In keeping with my attempt that seeks nowhere else but here what enriches the present saturated by commercial enterprises, I call my production system : entre-prise (under-taking); from emptiness to things and from things to space. I get back to the necessity to cleave words and to cleave reality to split it open. The entre-prise sets up strulptures – intercalary spaces – based on a work that takes its surroundings into account, imagining a piece in a particular context it integrates and re-thinks, avoiding superposition or uncaring importation that would be without any particular consideration for the receiving space.

With a strulpture, we stand neither entirely in front of nor entirely inside. The reason : it is itself in between a sculptural space and an architectural space – an in-between from which it gets its name. The purpose is to explore a range of processes that sculpture and architecture explore with more difficulties. Although strulptures propose to explore unusual regions of the space, including from the point of view of the traditional division of the arts, it is however not our purpose to erect an ideal space beyond places, at most we could invoke the ideality of a particular place as soon as investigated by a strulpture. Each strulpture has its own originality from the space with which it recomposes the emergence of this space, and makes sense through the engaged reflection on our being-in-the-world (neither entirely in front of nor entirely inside)(…).

Most of the time, our relation to space is circumscribed by our tendency to grasp it in a relation of containing to contents. If architecture and sculpture play with these determinations, without, however, reversing them, a strulpture strives to pass-between in considering the space before its division into containing and contents. That is to say meeting this moment of space where it emerges itself before we take place there and there adopt our postures. The fundamental operator that a strulpture carries out for this emergence, where time and space become entangled as well as matter and dynamism, is rhythm (…).

The matters of the artwork are minimal. The purpose is to compose with what is simple, with natural and vital elementary differences which open us to a reality of the space which is not only experimentable in the relation containing/contents and to a reality of time which deepens differences instead of forming substantial identities. Using matters which enable the creation of such natural differences fixes a measure : from our being to things, and reversely, from things to our being. This measure is already acting during the creation of the strulpture, not as the result of a controlling will, but as the quest of the line of our controlling will over things : at this point where creative activity does not only unveils, but at this point where matters make a dialogue possible.

X.R