A cube made of black agricultural foil contains a salt stone, on which a drop of milk falls every second. In 2009, the dairy sector in Europe experienced a new crisis with a steep price drop. Family farms using small-scale production methods are doomed to disappear: A certain way of doing agriculture erodes.
Gisèle Gonon’s project mixes materials from the agricultural world with artistic processes in order to preserve the mystery of what we are seeing in these extents of fields. Salt stones were used for their plastic quality - these white, pure and slightly granular blocks remin) the marble, and symbolic quality: salt preserves and prevents from rotting.The black agricultural cover also works as an element of a double language, both prosaic and completely artistic, double interest which is more generally at the heart of Gisèle Gonon’s work. This thick, dense, brilliant cover works as a strong plastic element in the fields when they are used to pack and protect the bundles of hay. (…)
She installed a black parallelepiped made with this cover. This strange place, made sacred by the solemnity which imposes a foreign, improper and monolithic presence, reveals inside a device close to that of the alchemist: a drip drops regularly some milk on a simple salt stone.The stone with its pure whiteness is smoothly, slowly affected. Decomposing materiality. Nothing spectacular, just a natural process shown in an artificial way, contrasts between whites and blacks, between human order geometry and nature’s random, between the appearance and the unveiled.
Text by Pauline Faure