"L`INTEMPORALITÉ NOSTALGIQUE" | "Nostalgic Timelessness" | Around 4,50 x 3,50 x 2mtr | Acrylic and spraypaint on wood and styrofoam
A Sculpture Project for “Expo Layup | Saison 3” in Toulouse, FR | 2023
Assistance Maestro Sherio (Gauthier Genêt), Nuno Viegas, Alonso Alcade, Loic Mondé, Team Expo Layup
Photography | Image 1/2/3 Nuno Viegas | 4 Hugo La Photo | 5/6 Alonso Alcade
The sculpture "L`INTEMPORALITÉ NOSTALGIQUE“ ("Nostalgic Timelessness") by the visual artist BASE23 quotes content-related and formal elements of significant places and buildings in Toulouse. BASE23 makes references to the basket arches of the "Pont Neuf" bridge (1614) by, among others, the master builder Marcel de Roy (Fig. 1), the façade of the "Marche Victor Hugo" market hall (1959) designed by Pierre Lafitte (Fig. 2) and the main building "Cité de l'Espace" (2003) designed by Henri-Georges Adam (Fig. 3).
The sculpture "L`INTEMPORALITÉ NOSTALGIQUE" is thus an architectural collage. It consists of abstractly visualised compositions, parts of the letters of the "Nom de Plume" BASE23, and even historical and creative epochs of the buildings created.The sculpture conveys a past, nostalgic impression. This is reinforced by the painted simulation of weathered concrete in contrast to the artificial looking monotonous space in royal blue. The neon pink elements imply the new, the modern and also reinforce the artificial impression. They detach the sculpture from its natural environment.
Due to the apparent heaviness of the concrete, the design elements appear massive and at the same time unnaturally light. The artist misleads the viewer here, creates an illusion in order to an illusion in order to set an attentive focus in our stimulus-saturated world and to the artificiality of the out-of-context situation. As in previous works by the artist, the classification in a temporal framework and the question of "What is reality?, what is fiction?" plays a major role. The title of the work reinforces this question: on the one hand, it quotes from the past, on the other hand, the artist's own, contemporary artistic examination is set in an artificial so that the viewers are challenged to classify the work themselves. The sculpture "L`INTEMPORALITÉ NOSTALGIQUE" by BASE23 thus attracts unconditional attention, which it is difficult to escape.
Based on the German text by Isobel Markus | Berlin, June 2023