flux [2023] • for electric guitar, objects & electronics

Under the trees in the garden of the St Étienne Church in Beauvais, like the lines of a drawing in space, appears Flux, a sculpture imagined by the artist Cécile Le Talec for this site. Around and through it, the greenery, the columns of the building, the church enter into its composition.

The sculpture is made up of stainless steel threads which give the illusion of having been led like weft threads between warp threads, as they would be called for a loom. Together, they form an extraordinary mesh. The city's drapery and textile activity will undoubtedly have inspired the artist. Flush with the ground, without a base or foundation, the sculpture evokes the light form of an organdi canvas or a large drape, which would have come to rest in this green setting.

Or would it, on the contrary, be a lifting of the ground? Throughout his creative residency in Beauvais, the artist collects sounds of the city, draws and writes in a notebook about the history of the site. She records the flocks of bells, the song of blackbirds and starlings, and sees the material thus brought together as a whole, in an approach of synthesis of the arts.

Cécile Le Talec thus invites the composer Francisco Alvarado to imagine, in turn, a second work: an original composition, created according to his musical and personal interpretation of the spectrographic form of the sculpture. This sound creation, inseparable from the work, will be played during the inauguration as part of a performance.

For the two artists, an invisible link seems to connect the line of the first drawings, the stainless steel wire of the sculpture and the acoustic wave generated by the music. As if the whole thing was moving and vibrating in the air until it produced a visual and audible sensation in us.

Francisco Alvarado • electric guitar & electronics
Cécile Le Talec • objects