<img src="https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/25/0/0/3333/2500/664/0/75/0/1a3d99e_1690274143485-st-refuge1-300.jpg" srcset=" https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/25/0/0/3333/2500/556/0/75/0/1a3d99e_1690274143485-st-refuge1-300.jpg 556w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/25/0/0/3333/2500/600/0/75/0/1a3d99e_1690274143485-st-refuge1-300.jpg 600w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/25/0/0/3333/2500/664/0/75/0/1a3d99e_1690274143485-st-refuge1-300.jpg 664w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/25/0/0/3333/2500/700/0/75/0/1a3d99e_1690274143485-st-refuge1-300.jpg 700w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/07/25/0/0/3333/2500/800/0/75/0/1a3d99e_1690274143485-st-refuge1-300.jpg 800w" sizes="(min-width: 1024px) 556px, 100vw" alt="" untitled="" (le="" refuge)"="" (2007),="" by="" stéphane="" tidet,="" wood,="" furniture,="" pumps,="" water."="" width="100%" height="auto">
The rain never ceases in Stéphane Thidet's cabin. It doesn't matter whether the weather outside is sunny or stormy − it rains on the table, it rains in the jug and it rains on the books. The lamp drips and the ceiling sobs. Under the onslaught of the drops, everything is completely drenched: The building is one of those cabins that you can't enter. You can make out the water through the openings in the floorboards. And through the window, you appreciate the extent of the disaster. Produced by an astonishing hidden mechanism, the raindrops pound, drum and never let up.
An expert magician of paradoxes, the visual artist produced this life-size installation for the Printemps de Septembre festival in Toulouse in 2007. Since then, this inverted Noah's Ark has been on tour, presented from the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris to the Tribunal de Nantes, as part of the "Estuary" program. The artist named it "Untitled (Le Refuge)," a double name that reflects the work's troubled state. Somewhere between the lumberjack's cottage and the cabin in Henry David Thoreau's Walden, a major reference for Thidet, this "refuge" refuses to protect us from anything.
Rather, it overwhelms us with its torrential flow, like a child's drawing turned into a nightmare. "Through the clear reference to the childhood mythology of the cabin in the woods, I wanted to play with elements that belong to us in a distant way and confront them in the context of a new situation," said the artist. "What happens when we can no longer trust the things that comfort us? The state of harmony is often questioned in my work. Comfortable familiarity is mixed with a certain anguish and fragility. In the end, I create situations that don't live up to their promise."
In his "refuge," reality is turned upside down à la Lewis Carroll. The rain sculpts the objects with its erosion, transforming each one into an ever-changing micro landscape. This phenomenon of entropy particularly fascinates the artist. "It wasn't the desire to work on a house that drove me, but the desire to create an object that fights against its own destruction," he said. "An interior landscape that is mine, ours, evoking that slow destruction that is quite beautiful in its struggle and common to us all."
It's hardly surprising, then, that Tidet constantly uses water in his work. He's already hijacked a fountain in Le Havre (Normandy), conjured memories of the Bièvre river flowing just a stone's throw from the Seine in his exhibition at Paris' Conciergerie and composed inky nights and ghostly ponds. These scenes have a disquieting strangeness about them, shot through with the vision of philosopher Gaston Bachelard in L'Eau et les Rêves ("Water and Dreams"), when he warns, "water keeps within itself night and death." Here, rain does too.