Mathieu Beauséjour – Icarus

Part of the Icarus cycle begun in 2009 by artist Mathieu Beauséjour, the installation Icarus (La Récolte) takes up the myth of Icarus to address the theme of the Sun's fascination. Beauséjour draws an allegory of greed and the overcoming of reason. The work recalls Beauséjour's preoccupation with the question of time and its passage, renewed through an appropriation of symbols, myths and historical content ranging from the Acéphale - a headless character popularized by the magazine of the same name directed by French writer Georges Bataille in the 1930s - to the stripe - an essentially deceptive motif, since each stripe can belong to both the receding and advancing planes. The work brings together various components, such as a black-and-white wooden piece of furniture on which rests a record player and a 33 rpm vinyl record of the sound produced by the Sun, as recorded by NASA. A monumental digital inkjet print on a polypropylene banner shows the sun's star in place of the decapitated head of a reaper, whose image comes from a Yugoslav banknote. Here, the dialectical representation of the work of economic, libidinal and symbolic forces employs the icon of the Sun to conjure up the figure of nihilism and its destructive potential. The work thus transposes notions of power, expenditure and loss that have spanned the ages to the contemporary context. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)