E-Cône, Lilian Bourgeat, 2022

Installation. Rond-point de la Croix-Margot, Beaumont-sur-Sarthe With the Commune of Beaumont-sur-Sarthe.

Even if sculptural gigantism stems from a centuries-old tradition that, since the beginnings of Pop Art, has been increasingly open to the representation of everyday objects, to the point of giving the impression that everything has been said through this particular category of sculpture, contemporary artists such as Lilian Bourgeat continue to question excess and to give it a dimension that challenges and destabilises. Indeed, while enlargement is commonplace in contemporary sculpture, Lilian Bourgeat uses the play on scale to fool the viewer.

By choosing to reproduce everyday objects, he wants to confront them with an apparently familiar environment (rocking chairs, garden furniture, boots, etc.) in which they can only move with difficulty. It's an artistic work in which the spectator takes on the role of participant, for example, Opening is a 2009 work made up of plastic cups larger than buckets into which visitors were invited to drink the opening cocktail (without the option of using real cups).

Lilian Bourgeat's work is based on the ambiguous relationship his works have with the viewer: while they challenge the viewer's relationship with the world, they can only 'exist' or at least take on their full meaning when someone stands next to them to give them scale. Their extraordinary size only becomes apparent to the viewer through comparison with his or her own body.
Text by Roma Lambert