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Plan d’étude pour Le triomphe de la neige : projection orthogonale Plan for The Triumph of Snow: orthogonal projection
the ink. With The End of Architecture, he traced the history of that discipline from memory, in a continuous line, so that the leaning tower of Pisa, the Eiffel tower and the Lyon opera house juxtaposed and interlocked in an encyclopaedic, chaotic vision. Responding to these monuments, which evoke great civilisations, there is the poetic, unprepossessing architecture of Empire. This house of cards, though frozen in precarious equilibrium and threatened with collapse, also appears as the ambitious dream of the tallest possible edifice. There is only a short distance between it and the absurd sugar castle that is continuously constructed and dissolved in the video Picnolepsy, with its poetics of ruin and suspended time. The scientific connotations of its title find an echo and an explanation in Paul Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance, where “picnolepsy” is defined as an infrathin, momentary absence from reality. A An equilibrium just as precarious characterises the “buildings” in The Pink Method. This construction game, an accumulation of black and white pieces of wood like the keys of a piano, is an interactive work that appeals to children’s creativity and sense of participation. It examines the link that exists between architecture and music, as explored, notably, by Iannis Xenakis, who saw the same mathematical thinking in both. A The link was also expressed, poetically, by Goethe, for whom architecture is frozen music. And it is illustrated, literally, by The Triumph of Snow, a dual nested structure of snowflakes. These starlike forms in needles and dendrites are all different, sharing only their hexagonal structure. The elements of the cupola-igloo contained in a prism were inspired by Wilson A. Bentley, who devoted his life to the study of snowflakes, photographing them systematically with scientific rigour. And The Triumph of Snow is one of The Nice Guy’s micro-architectures that the visitor is invited to enter. With Fantasma, the same concept gave rise to a space that could be experienced and explored, as a shipping container was turned into a bar traversed by an oversized femurbench. And the polyhedral structure of Fluorama is an ephemeral, peripatetic cinema in which to project the space opera The Rise and Fall of Black Light City. As a construction on the scale of the human body, though not enclosing it, The Mysterious Barricades, rises up in an accumulation of wooden beams, playing on a dialogue between inside and outside, heads and tails. As a modulable, transient architectural form, the barricade protects and demarcates. Here, it reveals what exists behind the scenes, making a space for reading and documentation in a specularisation of its own title. The same strange title, Mysterious barricades, is given to literary, musical and pictorial works which, far from providing enlightenment, only heighten the enigma. A The barricade is, above all, a frontier within urban space, a temporary wall in a street, recalling the connection between architecture and the city. The idea of architecture as a punctuation of urban space appears regularly in The Nice Guy’s corpus, for example interactively and humorously with Hypersquashland, an installation in which fluffy modules portray the complexity of an urban landscape. The visitor is invited to tread on them, thereby producing a sound of demolition. The paper buildings in Scotch 3000, also contain the idea of their own destruction. They are accompanied by a road network that suggests not only urban architecture but also infrastructure and economic development. A Elsewhere, it is the spirit of the place that remains, with buildings being replaced by the faces of those who gave their names to streets. In Street Spirits, on an asphalted table lit by miniature street lamps, books replace architecture, inviting the visitor to take a poetic, imaginative stroll around the city of Rennes. F bones, encyclopaedia, utopia. H. Kelmachter
piétiner ces éléments, produisant ainsi un son de destruction. Les bâtiments de la ville de papier Scotch 3000, contiennent eux aussi l’idée de leur propre destruction. Les immeubles bricolés sont ici entourés d’un réseau routier, évoquant non seulement l’architecture urbaine mais également ses infrastructures et son développement économique. A Ailleurs, c’est l’esprit des lieux qui subsiste lorsque les bâtiments laissent place à des visages, ceux des personnalités qui ont donné leur nom aux rues de la ville de Rennes. Dans Street Spirits, sur l’asphalte d’une table, éclairée par quelques lampadaires miniatures, ce sont les livres qui remplacent les architectures, invitant le spectateur à une promenade poétique et imaginaire de la ville. F encyclopédie, os, utopie. — Fragile or poetic, utopian or makeshift, architecture is a recurring element in The Nice Guy’s work. As a metaphor of an oeuvre that is being built up, constructed, developed, it is emblematic of his approach. For Vitruvius, its first theorist, architecture was a science that embraces a great variety of studies and knowledge. And this compendiousness is reminiscent of the way The Nice Guy’s work is evolving. As a discipline that draws on sciences and techniques, the properties of materials and assemblage procedures, architecture is first of all an art anchored in reality. This can be seen in the improvised, inflated mechanical digger in End of the Work: Doing, Undoing, Redoing. The delicate and derisory (if imposing) machine suggests an imaginary, infinite cycle of construction and destruction. Dozens of felt tips went into colouring the gleaming vehicle, each of them used continuously until it ran out. And this is Auto-painting Auto-peinture — 2004 (paint.) u. w. ; priv. coll. ; acrylics on cut-out canvas ; one of The Nice Guy’s favoured techniques: for the Superscribblepen 140 × 140 cm g pl. VIII p.16 ; pl.X p.18 A Monochrome pink, 19,600 cm2 —the series he draws directly on the wall right up to the exhaustion of area of The Nice Guy’s skin, as calculated by the Gehan and Georges