Florence Doléac

Chambre avec vue

2007

Proposition of arrangements of the room n°1 for Villa Noailles residents

The fascination of the view from the bedroom window causes embarrassment: would it be better to make the most of it sitting at one’s desk or lying in one’s bed? The arrangement of the bedroom here is a larksome proposal trying to respond to the magnetic desire for contemplation. The bed and the table are seen as improved tools, dedicated to this visual impregnation which might lead to one of definitive memorization. The resident leaves again with a “mental tattoo”. The closed bed “camera obscura”-like opens and shuts again as required, contemplating the view live, or toying with it. The foot of the bed is up against the window, which has a shutter pierced by a small hole. When closed, this shutter gives rise to the upside-down projection of the landscape on the upper part of the bed head when it is closed by a “screen”-like blind, or on the wall at the back of the bedroom, when it is open. A sliding door as well as a step offer access to the bed. Two bedside lights are incorporated in the corners of the bed, as is a tray which acts as an “office in the bed”.

Florence Doléac sets her work in an interstitial space where design hobnobs with art, and where presentation and production methods waver between a system that is both commercial and institutional. The fact that she lays claim to this not very common stance endows her with a specific identity. The fact is that not only does Florence Doléac introduce a tension between production and exhibition, with answers that brim with wit and poetry, but she also develops a line of questioning about function and its contrasting counterpart: uselessness. Her proposals and ideas sidestep established codes in order to upset the way we usually perceive things; she intercepts our gestures by putting a finger on their limits. The incongruousness of the various situations thus created refers us to our own imagination, thus lightening a reality that is far too straitjacketed.