Tenture des Eléments: l’Ether

I’ve always had a particular interest in archives, images and existing works, in bringing them out of their slumber, offering them alternative readings, intervening in them, working with them, putting them back into the present.

My tapestry of the Elements: l’ Ether is part of a transhistorical approach that underpins my artistic practice.
I chose Charles Le Brun’s famous tapestry series of the Four Elements (1680) as the inspiration for my work.
My interest in these art works was aroused not only by their high aesthetic quality, but also because this series seemed to me to be incomplete.

The fifth element, the ether, which was much discussed at the time these tapestries were created, is missing from the series.
The uncertainties surrounding the nature of ether fascinate me.
So I set myself the challenge of representing it by combining the resources available to Charles Le Brun at the time with a contemporary artistic approach.

Since ancient times, philosophers and physicists have pondered the question of the ether.
At the time of the creation of the tapestry series of the Four Elements, the ether was at the centre of discussions and research.
In his Principia Philosophia (1644), René Descartes drew and described it extensively. Descartes rejected the possibility of an absolute vacuum, and described the ether as a subtle matter made up of tiny transparent globules, filling space and enabling the transmission of gravitational force and the propagation of light through space. The philosopher thus developed the mechanics of vortices, or vortexes, explaining the movement of the planets in terms of large swirls of ether.

The impact of Descartes’ thought on his contemporaries was the reason I chose to select one of his drawings illustrating ether vortexes, taken from his Principia Philosophia. Using reproductions of the ‘Tentures des Eléments’ from the database of the Mobilier national, I selected my favourite elements to make a collage, which I then superimposed onto Descartes’s drawing of ether vortexes.

Before 1680 and the completion of the tapestries at the Gobelins manufactory, Isaac Newton joined the discussions on the ether and reacted to Descartes’ work. For him, the ether did exist, but whereas Descartes claimed to understand it, Newton evoked it more as a demiurge fluid, enveloping everything and inaccessible to human understanding.

The ether is, but above all it is uncertain, impalpable and unfathomable.

In order to express the inaccessibility and uncertainties associated with the ether, I let chance determine the presence or absence, the position and orientation of the elements I had selected from the ‘Tentures of the Elements’.

The result is an image where chance and uncertainty reign. I opted for randomness to interpret in a contemporary way the questions raised by the ether, which are still relevant today, about the nature of the void.

The borders are made up of daisy-chained elements from each of the four existing tapestries.
They are hollowed out so that Descartes’ drawing of the ether can envelop them, as anything would be enveloped by the ether.

In order to highlight Charles Le Brun’s contemporary beliefs, the luminiferous character of the ether, i.e. its ability to propagate light, was reflected in the use of gold and copper-coloured Lurex threads, as well as fluorescent and phosphorescent threads. The latter, revealing themselves in the dark, will make it possible to visualise the ether.