THE HAIRY TABLE

Wood, silicon, foam, pigment

2018

In the continuation of our tests on the diversion of ordinary materials, we made this table. Once more, we play the game of the never-ending temptation of our brain to attribute intentionality to inanimate objects. In seeking to give a form of life beneath the surface, we have created a table at the boundary of the living, a creature-object.

This table, a Cronenbergian skin-like artifact, is like a visual bug like those straight out of the unbridled and paranoid imagination of Max Renn, main character of the film Videodrome. Or like a sculpture by artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud that would have suddenly started to mutate.

The square-shaped white tiles, often used for protective reasons rather than decorative ones, are part of a collective unconscious. Widely present in collective spaces since the beginning of the 20th century, they are associated with hygienic surfaces. In contrast with hair, which, in recent years, has been associated in with dirt, being described as disgusting, stinking, inconvenient and even obscene.

In our society, hygiene is often associated with smooth surfaces. With the valorization of smoothness, the link between body representation by totalitarian and fascist systems and the perfectly smooth and sculptural bodies where nothing is ever out of place is no coincidence. Because the order does not like things that go beyond, the tumor that is part of this table implies and accentuates its abnormally increasing nature.