"Pressure pushin' down on me
Pressin' down on you, no man ask for
Under pressure that brings a building down
Splits a family in two, puts people on streets"

 

That's how David Bowie's song Under Pressure begins and, even if this sculpture wasn't created to respond to it, or worse, to illustrate it, these first stanzas convey the same feeling that animates this piece, and just as this song (which will always give me goosebumps) ends on a note of hope, the sculpture, too, and against all odds, dares to do so.

 
An imposing black stele crashes down on a white body whose deformations bear witness to the violence of the pressure, so much so that this human body can only be identified by the use of a t-shirt, that of a child, reduced to a pedestal. The power relationship is obvious, as is the hierarchical one. But pressure means resistance, and this body is not devoid of it. Shoulders straight, he takes it in his stride but doesn't give in. It suffers, but doesn't let go, and we might assume that this situation will come to an end, that this block will fall. But is this the instant of a sudden impact, or is it a gradual crushing over time? There's no way of telling, and that would be of little importance. So it's the story of a weight, of opposition, of incompatibility too, but also of a struggle and therefore of a hope, that of freeing ourselves from this burden which, in many respects, seems to me to be highly antinomic to any positive idea of human development. So much for the broadest level of interpretation, which I shall endeavour to apply to two subsets.

 

The first, which I often put forward as both a driving force and a position, is an anti-capitalist perspective which gives rise to a number of forms of the various aspects of an omnipresent and destructive capitalism. In the background, there is a desire to understand its essence, to define it, work by work, and in so doing to influence our perception of it in order to ‘work’ towards its end. You could say that this work is at the crossroads of research and activism. This approach is comparable to and complementary (in the opposite direction) to Frédéric Lordon's approach in his book ‘Figures du communisme’, in which he seeks to positively change the negative image with which communism is wrongly associated. 
According to this perspective, the pressure is that exerted by capitalist society, symbolised by this black block, on the bodies that make it up, the pressure that Bowie talks about when he speaks of a pressure capable of destroying a building or putting people on the street. But it's also the pressure of constant competition between us, the pressure of the working world, the pressure of the constant search for money for the vast majority of us, the pressure of systemic racism, and so on. The list is too long to go into. Faced with such force and its permanence, the feeling of being tiny, powerless, and somehow like a child, is reflected in the sculpture's battered white body.

The second, then, takes us into my personal history, both past and present. As with any artistic achievement, there are several levels of interpretation, but until now I haven't felt the need to share with you the very personal one of reading my latest works. However, there are times when we feel more need to confide in others. Perhaps this work lends itself more to that. 
Here, several stories are expressed through this sculpture: the story of a violent father who weighed heavily on my childhood and will influence my life forever; the story of my current role as a father and the absolute necessity of not becoming that same weight in my child's life; It's also about my childhood in the suburbs, in the poorest town in France, with all the violence and social rejection that can entail; and finally, it's about my current battle to retain custody of my son for the last 2.5 years, through a Kafkaesque procedure in which incompetence and discrimination join hands in a farandole to the glory of a dubious justice system. This sculpture can also be seen as a way of synthesising different personal situations which, in one way or another, all have to do with putting innocent bodies under pressure, and I'm sure it will resonate with you for similar albeit different reasons.

But as I said at the beginning of this text, whatever the level of interpretation chosen, there is certainly the need to externalise this pressure, to give it form, but also the certainty of freeing oneself from it. And it is perhaps through this externalisation, this distancing, but also through the discussions that will take place after this work has been made available to the public that you are, that the process of release is set in motion, that the positive potential of a future without pressure takes shape.