La Caverne  (2022 — Icosahedron, Steel, mirrors, light  — Commisioned sculpture)

This work makes Plato's cave literal in order to walk through it. A dark, closed exterior contains a luminous interior of repetitions, perspectives and reflections; as in the cave, perception can take a projection for a complete reality. But I do not only represent the cave — I build it so that it can be crossed.

By materialising the mental space that had enclosed me, I could at last look at it from the outside; creation becomes a passage, and what was an interior prison becomes an object separate from me. The mirrors produce an infinity that is materially an illusion yet yields a real experience — which unsettles the assumption that a thing is less real for being the result of a reflection.

The work also sets two uses of the same force against each other: on the film of *Radiation*, electricity burns holes, a white that signifies absence; in the icosahedron, that same electricity feeds luminous tubes, a white that signifies presence. Visually the two become almost impossible to tell apart — what looks like light may be a void, and what looks like infinite architecture may be a few tubes sealed in a finite volume. The piece settles neither in pure presence nor in pure illusion, but in the encounter between a force, a matter, and the perception that gives them a form — the cave built, at last, so that one can step outside and see it whole.