FOREWORD By the year 2040, more than 5 billion human beings will live in cities of all forms: urban zones, conurbations, sprawling great metropolises with difficult-to-define city limits. The ability to render a city viable and coherent will be a gigantic challenge for the survival of humanity. Humans have created ‘monsters’ hard to control… However, it is interesting to see that the living spaces created by humans are in permanent evolution, their shape and form dictated by nature itself, such is the notion of a cell and the distribution of energy. The ‘city’ becomes an ecosystem. It has energy, diffusion, exchanges of substances. It is a catalyst for knowledge and a generator for technological revolutions, both good and bad. It is a protective cocoon but it can also be a trap, limiting freedom and choice. Frederic Daty studies the relationship between a maker and his artwork with his series of wall sculptures. He studies this relationship by stripping cities of their façades and focussing on the structure, the skeleton, the core recreated from material that comes directly from the ground, raw steel, and the flux of energy represented by shadows, light and perspective. Imagining himself at the helm of an enormous microscope, he is the observer, the silent witness to the vibrant “city-worlds” with their perpetual changes and emotions left for the spectator to infer.
Daty works to recreate the energy fluxes that surround cities. He directs the gaze of the viewer to the nucleus of these forces within his sculpture, from whence the eye is drawn outward, exploding in all directions. We can find in the generated movements gently undulating curves and spirals, juxtaposed alongside aggressive shapes depicting the opposing views on the city. With a bit of distance, time is compressed and kinetic energy dominates. The hyper-mobility appears and the city becomes an entire life space for the inhabitants. While the concept of a self-sufficient city is increasingly topical, as seen in Beijing and Monaco, Daty explores the image of an emerging ecological modern city and our utopian vision of the protective legendary cities, as imagined by our ancestors in various mythologies. In the tradition of artists as diverse as Hieronymus Bosch, Gustave Moreau, Moebius, he synthesizes the dreamlike vision of a city - be it submarine, floating among the clouds or bustling with the noise and colour of merchant cities past - which are self-managing, regenerating but also eradicating all kind of individualism. Daty’s work questions the love-hate relationship between a city and its creator, amplifying the tension drawn from his personal views, feelings and reflections, and giving form to the questions that this dichotomy raises.
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