Like Child’s Play
Like Child’s Play turns the large gallery on the ground floor of the Madre museum in Naples, into a space for the construction of a life-size toy. From April 25, 2015 to February 29, 2016.
The installation is obtained by assembling about a hundred modules of different geometric forms and colors inspired by the solids of the German educationist Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. On entering the installation, visitors find themselves, as if in the museum’s atrium which they have just traversed, in a potential reality that enables them to reconstruct the world around them with a renewed sense of wonder and childlike amazement.
The work – the outcome of a collaboration between the artist and the architect Patrick Bouchain – is presented as a subtle dialogue with architecture, which becomes almost alive, performative, in which it is possible to stroll between hypnotic circles (with again black and white stripes 8.7 cm thick), colored arches, round towers, square plinths, triangular pediments, placed symmetrically to each other, as if they were part of the architecture of the museum itself, as if it were hypothetically possible to reconstruct it with one’s imagination. What appears in front of the observer is in fact a composite landscape, the reproduction of a true miniature city that relates the actual city (embedded in its archetypal forms, within the museum) with the imaginative city that rises before our eyes. A true promenade in color that proceeds from an initial pure white to a chromatic kaleidoscope, and that you can traverse with the eye following a rhythmic and dizzying perspective. A balanced and comprehensive “jeu d'enfant” (“children’s game”), hence the installation’s title.
