Müselet

2024

Acier thermolaqué
780 x 240 x 550 cm

Pop — the cork flies. We are celebrating a birthday, a wedding, a graduation or a housewarming. The champagne spurts from the bottle, glasses held out so as not to lose a drop of the precious liquid. A child hunts for the cork, which has shot off behind the sofa; the curious cat comes to help. The grown-ups clink glasses. For the youngest, apple juice is served, as long as it still fizzes.

The party is over; the empty glasses are cleared away, the table wiped down. All that remains is a humble little twist of wire with a coquettish name: the muselet. We hesitate to throw it out; it passes from hand to hand. And then, after a few subtle twists, the little cage becomes a character, then an animal — a small cat perhaps, a fox or a donkey. Now it is no longer thrown away but finds its place on the windowsill, a wink to remember that festive evening.

Looking out of the window, we suddenly imagine the little animal outside, in the garden; we picture it very large and ourselves very small — like a slightly comical modern sculpture, a child’s drawing in the sky, an animal in the garden.

And after all, why not? Art is there to make us smile, to help us dream, to weave a link between our everyday domestic life and a dreamlike world — open, funny, mad, strange, surreal.

Walking home, we take the little path that runs past the children’s playground, and there we see it: the great animal. It guards the path, or has strayed onto the lawn, or has simply grown up without noticing, until it became this immense sculpture.

The sculpture is a hundredfold enlargement of a champagne muselet. It is made of steel tube (60 mm in diameter) bent by digital control to a 3D plan, then industrially lacquered.

Made by Brauen Metal Système