Interview with Adélaïde Feriot

A rare and fleeting optical phenomenon, the green ray appears at sunset: before it disappears behind the sea horizon, the star gives off a thin green light for a few fractions of a second. In response to and mirroring this natural magic that catches your breath and gaze, Adélaïde Feriot associates this phenomenon with a form of meditative contemplation. In her work, a set of five sculptures, made of lead and aluminum, appear strangely floating and at the same time anchored in the ground. The illusion of levitation is created thanks to the bundles of tinted tissues evoking a fountain of tears gushing from silvery faces with closed eyes.

Disturbing and poetic, these suspended faces are waiting for bodies coming to inhabit them, forming a chorus of voices with mythological accents. The work is a living painting and a Greek choir: image-flesh with body-statues that grab a moment and stretch it in the memory. Echoing his first inspiration, this elusive green ray, the duration of the composition is modeled on the time it takes sunlight to reach the earth. In a way, even in their physical absence, bodies continue to inhabit space, as if the works had been charged with their energy through singing. Here the artist creates a perfect balance between landscape and body, natural and baroque, movement and immobility. We understand that Adélaïde Feriot’s research focuses on how we perceive images and time as living and plastic material.

Rayon vert (Green rays) is thus part of a larger body of works honoring horizons, seasons, stars, and winds, recomposing natural phenomena and evanescent landscapes within a three-dimensional space.