L’Œuvre-Louvre, 2000

The work made for the group show “D’après l’antique” – presented at the Musée du Louvre and dedicated to works inspired by antique masterpieces – develops dynamically and centrifugally from the photographic reproduction of the Borghese Gladiator located at the centre. The image serves as the generating hub of a sequence of squares depicted – analogous to the format of the photograph – in gradual growth and rotation towards the exterior. The dizzying succession of squares is set in motion by the outstretched hand of the Gladiator, which just emerges from the edge of the photographic image, thereby emphasizing the gesture that causes the unstoppable proliferation. Each of the squares of the work contains a letter drawn in coloured pencil; together they spell out the name of the work. At the centre, two red diagonals prolong the force lines of the Borghese Gladiator (underscored by the hand and the foot that emerge from the image’s square outline), as if to determine the pivot of the rotating dynamic, and at the same time indicate the radiating trajectories of a never-ending growth.
On the one hand, the expanding squares recall the “echoes” that the ancient sculpture has produced in the history of humankind, and on the other, as the artist writes in a comment to the work, the exhibition rooms that over time have hosted the sculpture and its countless offshoots: hence, the title “L’œuvre-Louvre”, in which the anagram alludes to the proliferation of reflections and memories, that is, the “museum” that each work generates in time, and to the space of endless resonance it is a part of and whose amplification it contributes to.