The website of Jean Lemonnier

I created this stone sculpture for a group show at the Ishinominzoku Museum of Takamatsu, Japan. My goal was to create an object that could serve the function of proposing abstract speculative narratives… while maintaining a certain visual impact which would guide in a certain way the narrative that the object would sustain with its environment or its audience. There isn’t a precise scenario, but the themes I wish to highlight are those of the sublime, permanence, and the spiritual. I often think of the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey when I create this kind of work — that immense minimalist sculpture suddenly appearing in the landscape, whose origin and author remain unknown. Through the sheer power of its presence, it establishes a relationship with those who see it — a relationship that ultimately changes the course of humanity. That ineffable connection between object and subject is something that also exists in reality, and I personally experienced it in Blandas, when I went to visit the Cromlechs — those alignments of stones whose purpose is unknown, yet whose aesthetic and spiritual force struck me deeply, even though I don’t believe in god. That feeling was amplified by the almost pilgrimage-like nature that the journey took on at the time. It felt as if there were a form of communication happening between those vertical stones and myself — like I was trying to commune with the people who placed them there more than 5,000 years ago. A more local example of such “inhabited” objects would be Japanese steles: true minimalist architectures containing the intact soul of the deceased, serving as objects of contemplation for the living. I sense this communion particularly in Shinto and Buddhist temples, whose sophisticated architecture evokes, to me, the collective effort of the craftsmen who built them, rather than their religious function.That’s what interests me — the image we create of an object and of what inhabits it, because people before us took the time to construct it to sustain their own beliefs, and in the end, these objects become receptacles for our own systems of representation.