Right in the centre of Paris’ Place Vendôme is this multi-faceted mirrored assemblage entitled Ring, by French artist Arnaud Lapierre. The cylindrical structure is made of reflective cubes, and its name refers to the structure of the war monument it stands opposite, which is made from the spent cannon of the Russo-Austrian armies conquered by Napoleon 1.
The assemblage throws the square in which it is situated into a visual tumult, reflecting and simultaneously digesting the historical structures around it, dissolving them in an endless chain of reflections and distorting our perception of space and volume.
‘Ring invites the visitor to play with the installation and space on two levels,’ explains Lapierre. ‘The very first approach would be more related to experience a change in the urban areas: as a temporal kinetics. The facets of each cube reflects the place and reconstruct a paradigm that breaks the reading of the course. Ring works at this stage as a visual intrusion, an acceleration that changes the perception of the visited place. This is a spacial rediscovery. In a second step, the installation proposes to get inside, to see his own image multiplied to infinity, which collides with urban detail, it is now a place outside time and outside spatiality, in total rupture with the outside principle. The vision is more intimate.’
Wild!
amazing how mirror can add a such a level of understanding to space through distortion.