130 x 105 x 60 cm, 7’38, pierre, amplificateur, cuir, lecteur mp3, haut-parleurs, casque audio, medium, peinture acrylique, bois massif, feuille de pissenlit, plume de pigeon, contreplaqué.

The hidden secret of the masters presents a stone, enthroned on a pedestal, above
a landscape built with poor elements. The installation broadcasts a concrete music
symphony on speakers, addressed to the rock, while it is necessary to seize
a curious earpiece to hear the story told of it. I use snippets of intimate memories to
compose this first sound work: a parabolic text on pedagogy written at the Beaux-Arts de
Nantes in 2011, as well as objects gleaned and preserved. These are so many treasures
of a collection that I accumulate modestly, with time and the childish spirit that continues to animate me.

« Two masters wondered about the structure of the universe. One of them said that after man we would find nothing more convincing and more superb. The other assured that before man and after him, there was always and would be a quantity of cells, and therefore that man was not the ultimate factor, but rather that it was the particles elementary, of which man is only a conglomerate. The other, offended, retorted genius, logic. What about gray matter, he said as they passed by a forest and a lake. The second had the idea of ​​the demonstration to prove to his friend the master that cells, even without intelligence, should always be placed at the top of the pyramid of living things. He took a stone and threw it into the pond. It sank into the opaque liquid, leaving in its wake a characteristic flop and a water wave. The first nodded.

The forest hid the storm and the storm veiled the firmament. Behind, there were the stars, themselves hidden by the intensity of the solar rays. The latter excited the tops of the clouds, invisible from below, since it was dark, in the rain, in the forest. There, there was a tree, at the edge of a meadow which sheltered a leaf. We couldn’t really distinguish it from the rest of the leaves, due to lack of observation, the birch leaf, like all the others in this birch monoculture. But this one would fall last, on the last day of winter, in an Olympic slide inspired by the breeze, on the pile that the other leaves would form, in the shape of a crescent moon, for the one who, in the middle of the clearing, would watch as he died, before pivoting and realizing that in fact a half-moon, it was a perfect circle that surrounded him. The individual would conceive it from above, in his mind the rain having stopped and a ray of light managing to pierce the forest.

In the pond, the stone was very alone and very wet. He thought of the cold brought by the emerging winter and of the warm rays that he would never see again, so deeply ensconced that he was in the depths of the abyss. He in no way accepted his position to assert, his stature as ultimate proof in the eyes of the masters, his role as a missing link in the chain of elementary particles, nor his acquired place, hidden from the eyes of common sense. How could you do it, stone, incapable of moving and reasoning with the masters? How could you untie your chains and see the emancipation of your race of geological allies, from the depths of your dark cell populated with aquatic residue? That destiny had not endowed you with less intermediate qualities, that had it not made you a salient flint on the path of the masters who seized you, with you the opportunity to tear the veil of global ignorance, and makes your virtues sink into the limbo of a lake. Remember the hope that once filled you, when from a tectonic block that had seen you grow, you were extracted to carve you into a keystone. Barely installed in the church when it fell under secular bombs. Barely a second in your miserable life. And you knew the sea whose features the wave left you before fate left you there, residing in your final home, you thought. So much so that the shade of the forest sometimes seemed conducive to you to rehash these inhospitable memories, because chance had made you find this warm corner. But then you were thrown into the water, and you suspected that never again would you disperse into grains due to the tide, nor would you have the opportunity to accumulate the heat of the sun and even less to keep a little warm around the lake when night falls. You will remain the buried secret of the masters.

However, a scientist was distilling his philosophy in front of a group of inattentive professors, in the room adjoining the room where animal bodies and other skeletons had been stored since a law or reform had condemned them to dust under lock and key. His knowledge beaded on his forehead and echoed in the corridor. He was outraged that his classes were taught so little about the exact sciences and was sorry for his students whose blackened notebooks were the only measure of ignorance. Where was the dry spirit of mathematics, where the geniuses of tomorrow who would lead the herd to solve infinitely small and explosive problems? Or ? He was talking about pedagogy, while the director passed by, turning his head when he found the solution. He had to provide his students with proof of the existence of the stone, or the stone itself that he had searched for so much. This answer weighed on him. »