A universal resonance

Everyone recognizes that we are experiencing a major technological revolution each day impacting more the very nature of our human behaviors. In our current environment focused on visual and virtual, images and the recent phenomenon of selfies submerge us. In no time, the practice of selfie has become a mass phenomenon, collectively fully absorbed, revealing the evolution of the status of the subject itself. This generalized practice of self-portrait conveys in fact a global and major anthropological shift.
Cell phones have become a true extension of ourselves, and the transcultural generalization of selfies (more than a million of new selfies posted everyday on social networks) raises the questions of the place, the usefulness and the power of images in our contemporary societies.
 
A global self-staging
 
The practice of selfie appears as a way of reinsuring and rooting in a world where individuals do not necessarily find space to express themselves freely and to share, to exert their vital need for games (especially social), for theatricality through the staging of their passions. The selfie has therefore become an essential ritual for each and every people.
 
Toward a new gesture directory
 
Such a self-staging, at arm's length, generates the emergence of a catalog of new gestures at a global scale, incorporating expressions, meaning and use at a level unparalleled in the history of humanity. Its aesthetics, glorifying posture, body, heroic expressivity and the will to catch an immediate action revives the tradition of the representation of Gods and well-known figures as it was practiced in Antiquity, especially during the Hellenistic period. Instruments of power, knowledge, entertainment, care or seduction, smartphones have replaced both in function and symbolism, Zeus lightening bolt, Apollon’s lyre or Hermes caduceus.
 
Sculptures to convey and to reveal a new form of universal non-verbal communication
 
The body language characteristic of the practice of selfies I have listed and indexed over more than three years, constitutes the creation of a new form of universal non-verbal communication. These hand movements, their strength, their sensitivity, their agility, their determination exhibit plastic qualities I wanted to highlight them by choosing full-scale sculptures - human size 180cm - to install a direct relationship and confrontation with the viewer. The work of art is especially characterized by the fact that whatever your gender, ethnic origin, religion, job… you can identify with it, project yourself and recognize yourself in it. It generates an immediate interaction.
 
 
Relationships with time, new technologies and memory
 
The work « In Memory of Me », was made using the most innovative 3D-priting technologies, thanks to the support of a French company -Initial les Créations- however respecting the traditional sculpting techniques. Statuary questions a key point in our civilization. The questions seem to be focused on self-assertiveness and on a constant research for recognition ; they are also linked to the shifts brought by virtuality and the digital transition, what these reveal of the subject status, of public space, of our need for myths, of our addiction to new communication ways. This work of art is an invitation to look into a world undoubtedly seeking out new ways to be together, new self-images for the millions of people in it. It also raises the question of sculpture today, and the relationship with time and memory.
 
As many research directions led between 2013 and 2017 in collaboration with sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, political analysts, photography historians, digital experts… Many of them have written texts connecting their area of expertise and the work of art, adding therefore a scientific backing to the artistic work.

 

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