"Maremonde", An Installation by Alain Géronnez

Alain Géronnez, "Maremonde", installation, water, newspapers 
4.60 m (diameter), Speelhoven '01 

Embedded in a rural landscape, underneath a lush tree, surrounded by the grass of a meadow, a nearly circular 'pool' has been created by installing a layer made of slightly overlapping newspapers placed side by side, in a shallow hollow, an almost unnoticeable depression discovered in the flat ground. This 'newspaper pool' has been filled, up to a point, with water, leaving a margin of light grey newspapers  uncovered by the water in the pool. The whitish newspaper-covered bottom of the basin, in combination with the sparkling water above it, is producing strange effects of sunlight mirrored in the pool. The element of water is very noticeably 'alive' for it can also be stirred, and while we see it, it is apparently stirred by the wind. It is translucent and this latter quality is even more obvious because of the light grey, almost white newspapers at the bottom. Its movements contrast with the ring of newspapers sticking out from the basin which form a strange, light grey, stationary zone of transition between the artificial pool and the green leaves of the meadow. But the paper, processed in a paper mill and covered with newspaper print in a print shop, stems also from nature, its substance being pulp, its source being the wood of felled trees.

The onlooker perceives the artificial installation integrating the live element of translucent water and the produced, extremely 'social' or 'society-based' element of a layer made of many copies of daily newspapers in a context which grants wide vistas that open up between the trunks and foliage of trees. A focal point, a source of life is suggested by the water, the almost circular (and insofar, almost abstract rather than organic) form of the "spring" constructed. A spring that reflects sunlight and the color of the sky. It is almost self-evident that this installation could only be placed below a tree, underneath its leaves, at the edge of a meadow. The hand of man, the vision of an artist, of Alain Geronnez, has added to the seeming innocence of nature (A NATURE ALREADY INTEGRATED IN FACT INTO A SOCIAL FABRIC, BY THE VERY USE WE MAKE OF IT) a new, purposeless, non-instrumental and therefore, much more real and true, innocence. It is obvious that this difference, between the real and the seeming or illusory is the fundamental opposition, or contradiction, we encounter and are thus made aware of, in Alain Geronnez's installation realized in the context of the SPEELHOVEN exhibition in 2001.