PROJECTS

Les Manteillons du Mont Blanc

2014

The mountain, an overwhelming mass that invites us to think of the invisible.

 

In its womb, amid the millions and millions of atoms and molecules, it is said that the “Manteillons” are imprisoned. These are flying spirits that thanks to their cloaks of fire creep into the deepest cavities.

 

Is it they that generate the wonderful red fluorite, one of the rarest and most precious crystals of Mont Blanc?

 

A popular legend of the Aosta Valley

 

 

 

The wooden sculpture is made up of some three thousand pieces clustered together like molecules, while preserving the variegated form of Mont Blanc. The heights of the peaks, the depressions, the continuous variations of the surface, are conveyed through a highly empathic work with an immersive appearance.

 

Four monitors are embedded within the structure to give viewers the impression they are venturing within the crevasses and observing the innermost recesses of the mountain. The video, reproduced on the four monitors, appears particularly evocative, inspired by legends that spirits or goblins – in this case the manteillons – have been imprisoned in the mountain. Beneath the peaks, live secret forces that have always inspired poets, artists and climbers. In this case I wanted to give these tales a modern significance by imagining a happy ending, with these creatures of the fantasy world transformed into the magnificent red fluorites of Mont Blanc, a precious jewel of alpine mineralogy and a specific feature of this unique mountain.

 

Hence the work creates a dialectical relationship between the visible and the invisible in a dialogue in which the mountain acquires mysterious and imaginative overtones as a prelude to other worlds.

 

The work is part of my investigation of the nanomolecular world that enables me to explore the infinitesimal part of matter by creating multiple natures, in constant metamorphosis, so expanding the sphere of knowledge.

 

In my research, each element is determined through a renewed visual perception: the forms and energies of the universe can be imagined in a gram of matter and this opens up a new aesthetic scenario characterized by a multiplicity of approaches.