Measure and Excess

Christophe Corbier, CNRS Researcher

Measure

As the visitor crosses the threshold of Villa Kérylos, two words written in neon letters come into view: Measure, Excess. One is reminded of Protagoras’ famous maxim, the motto of humanism: “Man is the measure of all things.” But for Pierini, the guiding figure of humanism is the rebel, in the sense understood by Albert Camus: “It is revolt that is measure, that orders it, defends it and recreates it throughout history and its disorders.” Measure is not the Tepid Thought that the visitor discovers in the first floor bathroom. Born from a mixture of hot and cold water, Tepid Thought glows faintly before being drained away through the opening at the bottom of a heavy marble bathtub. With these two ironic words, Pierini has created a bland work in which light and colour seem almost faded.

Nothing could be more opposed to tepid thought than Camus’ conception of measure: “Measure, born of revolt, can only be lived through revolt. It is a constant conflict, perpetually stirred and mastered by intelligence.” This creative opposition between measure and excess is immediately at work in the vestibule and the forecourt. The Line and the Angle establishes an initial rhythm through the contrast between thick blue and mauve glass plates, bevelled and cut to varying lengths, and broken lines inspired by the antique friezes found throughout the Villa.

The visitor is then welcomed by a copy of a statue preserved in the Vatican Museums in Rome. A century ago, Théodore Reinach, the creator of Villa Kérylos, believed it to represent the poet and statesman Solon, whereas it is generally identified as Sophocles. Whether it is Solon or Sophocles is ultimately of little importance. What matters is the idea of measure. The three words displayed in neon invite us to reflect upon the Greek concept of metron: Measure in blue, then, distorted, Excess and Measures in white. These words resonate with Solon’s role in the city of Athens at the beginning of the sixth century BC. Solon, the legendary founder of Athenian democracy, declared: “I wrote laws alike for the wicked and for the good, adapting to each an equal justice.”

Violence

One must venture further into the Villa to discover the effects of excess and violence, embodied by the artist through symbolic works. This is the case with the installation After the Battle in the Triklinios (dining room). Beside a large orange vessel, recalling the shape of the jars made by the potters of Biot until the end of the twentieth century, the fragments of two vessels rest upon the antique tables once designed by Reinach for his residence. Pierini poured molten glass into these vessels and the heat caused them to shatter. The fragments were then embedded in cooled translucent glass, giving these two works the appearance of pools of glass flowing from the broken vessels, as though oil or wine were spilling from ancient amphorae.

Each viewer is free to discover symbols within these objects arranged upon the tables of the Triklinios, fragile glass forms that evoke the commercial and human exchanges that once animated the entire Mediterranean basin. Yet the broken amphora immediately suggests the violence of human beings, indifferent to its fragile beauty and incapable of communicating, of entering into dialogue, of building the shared space of a common culture. These objects, destroyed by molten glass, become the symbolic expression of excess, of a non Mediterranean spirit, to borrow Camus’ words. In contrast with Greek measure, excess gives rise to conflict, catastrophe and death: these three vessels, in their simple forms, inevitably call to mind the tragic realities of our own time.

Lightning Flashes

Born of fire, opaque or translucent, glass either allows light to pass through it or obscures its rays. The work of the glass artist is therefore a constant interplay with light and its effects. In Pierini’s work, this dialogue is accompanied by a profound attention to the symbolism of light. For him, one of the essential spaces within Villa Kérylos is the library, an emblematic place of humanist culture and the Enlightenment of reason. This vast room is simply furnished with two writing tables, cabinets and bookshelves containing books and ancient artefacts. Théodore Reinach conceived the library as a place of meditation and tranquillity, as expressed by the Greek inscription on the two facing walls: “There, among Greek orators, sages and poets, I enjoy repose in eternal beauty.”

Within this peaceful space, Antoine Pierini sought to represent the sudden irruption of the sun striking the reader. On one of the medallions beneath the mezzanine appears the name of Plato beside that of Aristotle. Close to this inscription, Pierini suspended two words in neon: High Light. Positioned high above the library, these words evoke the force of lightning, at once creative and terrifying. Zeus is famously associated with the thunderbolt that overthrows Prometheus and all the rebellious Titans. Fascinated by lightning, Pierini naturally alludes to this divine attribute, which is also connected to glass through fulgurite, a naturally occurring opaque glass created when lightning strikes sandy ground.

The artist also had Albert Camus’ The Stranger in mind. This High Light may be understood as the sun exerting unbearable pressure upon Meursault at the fateful moment when he encounters “the Arab” on a beach in Algiers, crushed by the heat and consumed by the sun. The sun that strikes and blinds Meursault is a hostile force. Apollo, the god of music, medicine and light, is also the god who bears the knife, the merciless deity who blinded Oedipus. How could one fail to think of Sophocles, whose name appears on another medallion in the library, facing High Light? When Oedipus discovers the terrible truth, the cause of the plague devastating the city of Thebes, he can do nothing but condemn himself to eternal darkness by putting out his own eyes. In The Stranger, Meursault, accused of murder, is likewise condemned without ever fully understanding the motives behind his act, brought about by a fatal solar force. High Light thus evokes a power opposed to the measure and tranquillity sought by the reader in the library. For Pierini, neon casts a light that is less reassuring than profoundly tragic.

Migrations

Light and the sun do not carry this dysphoric meaning in the installation The Object of the Journey, displayed in the Amphithyros, between the library and the Triklinios. Nine glass vessels, translucent or opaque, were created using different techniques. Among them, Pierini employed the merletto technique, invented by a Murano glassmaker during the twentieth century, which consists of intertwining threads of glass to imitate lace. Inspired by ancient amphorae, these vessels evoke the peaceful commercial exchanges between the peoples of the Mediterranean.

Yet although glass has historically been associated with everyday objects, Pierini frees these forms from their utilitarian function in order to transform them into what he himself calls “living” sculptures. In becoming a sculptor of glass, shaping rhythm through light and matter, he reconnects with his favourite author, Albert Camus, who wrote in The Rebelthat sculpture is “the greatest and most ambitious of all the arts,” an art that seeks to stylise gesture and movement, to “imprison within a significant expression the passing fury of bodies or the endless whirl of attitudes.”

In The Object of the Journey, each vessel, with its handles, neck and swelling form, takes on the appearance of a small statue whose opaque whiteness recalls the colour of Archaic female figures.

The amphora loses its status as a container intended to transport oil, wine or grain, and acquires the dignity of an ancient idol. It immediately calls to mind Pre Hellenic art and the Cycladic figurines of the third millennium BC. The Object of the Journey, conceived by Pierini as an immersive work, is also a symbol of travel. These objects, which seem to move across time and space, evoke a micro history of migration, of which the Mediterranean has all too often become the tragic stage.

Pebbles and Hills

The Pebbles are glass creations scattered throughout the shelves of the library, among oil lamps, vases and Tanagra figurines. With their full, rounded forms and their brown hue, they resemble gently gleaming stones, as though polished by the human hand, unless they are pebbles smoothed by the sea over millions of years. These glass stones evoke the immemorial ages of humanity and the action of time which, through erosion, patiently burnishes stone. Their welcoming roundness, perfectly suited to the human hand, almost invites us to touch them, to experience their smooth or granular texture, as though the tactile sensation itself might reveal something of their mysterious presence among the ancient artefacts once collected by Théodore Reinach.

Like the Pebbles, the organic Hills, gathered into two groups, assert a presence that is at once enigmatic and reassuring. The first group is installed in the Balaneion, near the entrance to the Villa. The sculptures, whose harmonious and homogeneous colours alternate between mauves, blues and pinks, together with translucent and gilded pieces, are aligned along the two edges of the pool. They form an angle whose apex is marked by the fountain. These Hills, with their soft, rounded forms echoing the curves of the basin and the niche, carry a particular meaning for the artist. They suggest the fertility and fecundity of nature through forms that he regards as feminine.

The second group is installed outdoors upon the stony ground, not far from the garden. These works, whose forms recall shells, eggs or rocks, are aligned so as to form a straight line. The irregular contours of the organic Hills respond to the right angle formed by the two white walls, whose imposing mass appears to dominate these small, fragile, multicoloured objects nestled at the foot of the Villa.

Transmutations

Inspired by Brancusi’s Endless Column and Bird in Space, Pierini created his Reed Columns, inspired by bamboo and rising to heights of up to six metres. They were installed in the courtyard of the Villa, facing an oleander, allowing the mineral world to enter into dialogue with the vegetal world. These Reed Columns are composed of modules equivalent to the drums used in ancient columns. The circumference of these modules, at their joints, was calculated from the dimensions of the flutes of the Doric columns surrounding the peristyle. The verticality of the Reed Columns echoes that of the Landmark Trees, inspired by one of the Mediterranean’s most emblematic trees, the cypress.

Standing between two and four metres high, these Landmark Trees are a remarkable technical achievement, demonstrating Pierini’s virtuoso mastery of glass. He produced elements measuring 1.10 metres in length, pushing as close as possible to the breaking point of the gather at the end of the blowpipe. The stones used for the bases come from Spain, Egypt, Greece, Italy and Tunisia, once again symbolising the shared heritage of Mediterranean cultures.

These glass trees, at once fragile and resilient, together with the Reed Columns, bear witness to Pierini’s fascination with the countless transmutations made possible by glass, between mineral and vegetal forms. These transmutations are particularly evident in Inner Sea, created especially for the Gallery of Antiquities at Villa Kérylos. This monumental sculpture, a vast glass mosaic that leaves ample room for intuition, transforms liquid into solid. It arrests the movement of a wave entering through a window and rising through the gallery in a vast sweeping curve. Its many shades of blue, cobalt, ultramarine, midnight blue and violet blue, give it the shimmering, iridescent appearance of the sea itself. Through this assemblage of abstract elements, Pierini succeeds in capturing the instant when the wave seems about to crash down upon us with all its force.

Mounted against a wall of exposed stone, Inner Sea is a magnificent evocation of the Mediterranean so dear to the artist, this crossroads of cultures, this sea enclosed by lands, at once tragic, violent and filled with light.

Christophe Corbier
CNRS Researcher