Portrait of the Spectator on a Tightrope

“… There will be no one here to scold me if I get too close to the fire. Oh ! How funny it will be when my parents see me through the looking glass and they can’t catch me! ” Lewis Carroll

Cosimo climbed up to the fork of a large branch, where he could sit comfortably, and he sat there with his legs dangling, his arms crossed, his hands under his armpits, his head tucked under his neck, his tricorn pressed against his forehead (…) – Yes, but I will not go down! – And he kept his word. 

Italo Calvino

When the Octave Cowbell Gallery asked Aurélie Menaldo to take over their space, she accepted without hesitation. How can you resist the allure of presenting a contemporary piece in a bourgeois living room with parquet floors, mouldings and a fireplace? In one more room where you enter through the window like in Alice’s world. A world that also belongs to Aurélie, to everyone in fact, a world to which we must from time to time give the right to exist in real life. This has been achieved at 5, rue Parmentier, in Metz.

Inscribed in her daily universe, near her computer, the object has never left the eye and the mind of the artist. Small, multi-coloured, survivor or relic from childhood, it can be made to dance in the palm of your hand. A piece of PLAYMOBIL is indeed at the origin of “Superfétatoire” (Redundant). Its link with the bourgeois salon seems to have been imposed from the outset, but a broken link, let’s add.

The process first involved the metamorphosis of materials and scale. Wood has replaced plastic. Now complete and much bigger, the small relic has reached an almost monumental size; the border of the circus arena from a children’s fantasy construction game has thus become a large model that fills almost the entire space of the exhibition gallery.

And it’s a circus arena that works. The direction of movement in the gallery has been disturbed, the spectators enter through one or the other window, they move in one direction or another. But they are also constrained, impossible to descend; they can neither touch the ground nor the walls, they become tightrope walkers, moving statues, or PLAYMOBIL characters, on an unusual plinth. A way to float 60cm above the ground by walking on the narrow, multi-coloured 60cm-wide strip.

The spectator becomes the actor of an unexpected performance, of unusual or even insane wandering. Walking lightly and aimlessly on / in the colour, this is not done anywhere else. The space of Octave / Alice’s living room, and that alone, makes this possible. From the street, no one will be able to scold or criticize, “it will be very funny”. A mockery break with bourgeois space, the place of all the games of appearance, but a link with the lightness of elsewhere, on the other side of the mirror in Alice’s living room, on the other side of the window of the Octave Cowbell Gallery: “at last separated from himself (the spectator) can laugh at his own heaviness (inscribed) in the massive coherence of the established order”.

Aurélie Menaldo decided to baptize her play “Superfétatoire” (Redundant). A funny word, old-fashioned, almost hostile, in any case not pretty. She says she chose it because it evokes unnecessary addition, contrivance, what her room would be: neither a sculpture nor a painting. “Come on, there’s nothing here”, just a quick walk before returning to the street suddenly transformed into the backstage of elsewhere. But with a photograph / souvenir in his pocket, the spectator/acrobat will be able to reactivate the imaginary transfer as often as necessary, because dreaming is necessary.

The tightrope walker for a moment will then find the vibrations of his performance on all the edges of the sidewalks, on all the white, blue or red lines in search of a moment of disconcerting freedom, of pilfered lightness, unable to settle finally in a tree to escape the gravity of the world in the manner of the young Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò imagined by Italo Calvino.

Superfétatoire takes its origin from superfetatio and superfetare, words from medieval Latin which mean: “to conceive again”. From the vocabulary of biology, they refer to the fertilization of several eggs in the same ovulation period, hence the semantic extension to the notion of useless, two is too much! With Aurélie Menaldo’s proposal, the word lands in the world of poetic metaphor. “To design again” then becomes “to design differently”, to transform the useless into the necessary. A reversal, the inscription of the dimension of irony.

The artifice is therefore not superfluous, it is the magician’s sleight of hand, the artist’s own art of feint. When Aurélie Menaldo transforms the viewer into a tightrope walker, into an almost acrobat, she bestows on him the apparently ridiculous freedom of a character from the circus world. In order for the people of this world to be able to: “…live, they must enjoy full freedom. (…) They must be licensed to be nothing more than a crazy game. (…). “. The circus is “a challenge to our certainties, taken seriously. “. To become an almost tightrope walker, for a moment in time, on the edge of an almost circus arena, is to experience nothing less than a breach, a void in the too smooth fabric of everyday life and see it open up the space of an elsewhere while walking on the colours almost aimlessly, between two windows

Octave Cowbell Gallery exhibition, Metz, 2014