paw
PAW is a column-pedestal born from a change of scale and status applied to a decorative detail: a bronze lion’s paw taken from an old lamppost belonging to the Mobilier National (For collective Exhibition Les Aliénés, 2022). Extracted from its small role, redesigned, and amplified, this paw becomes a base capable of supporting architecture itself.
The piece has several references: the rigor of the Doric column, fluted verticality, and the palmiform capital inherited from ancient Egypt. At its core appears a deliberately dissonant element: a monumental screw thread, borrowed from contemporary technical vocabulary, suggesting potential movement—a column capable of deploying itself. In the real world, this mechanism is fixed; in Monde n°2, it becomes operative.
The lion’s paw—a recurring motif in the decorative arts —is here exalted, almost hypertrophied. It crushes a deliberately heterogeneous assembly of forms and symbols, left without an explicit key to interpretation. The work plays on the coexistence of highly realistic volumes and more stylized forms, sometimes close to cartoon aesthetics, in order to create ruptures, surprises, and shifts in meaning.
In the real world, PAW stands one meter tall and is carved in linden wood. In Monde n° 2, the piece changes scale: it becomes a structural column, an altar pillar.
PAW reveals the extent to which the decorative is, in itself, structural. Structural in a physical sense, since the motif becomes a supporting element. Structural in a symbolic sense, because ornament forms a foundation of myths, narratives, and representations that support our mental and cultural architectures. PAW asserts that ornament is not a secondary addition, but one of the very foundations of construction.