A Greek temple for modern mythologies, a jungle choreography, pinches of cinematic rain, boards, notes, storytellers, and alexandrines: put away your wisdom, fold your reasons, awaken your poetry from the daily trivialities. Before your eyes, the world takes the stage, making way for the burlesque in this bronze work by ARI EROM, as if the doublet of this sculpture were a half wink to Charlie Chaplin: the umbrella that Chaplin would have loved to carry.
By slipping with the winds into the world's interstices, like Mary Poppins flying with her umbrella, the umbrella seems designed to take the blows of flat weather surfaces. Waiting to get wet, it stands on the front line. Interludes for intimacy, entrechats without intermediaries, incidents at the mezzanine, intertwined interlacings... the rain plays and so does it, like Fred Astaire humming "Singing in the Rain." Enchanted parentheses that patiently weave their hiatus between the fleeting hours of our lives.
The umbrella takes us away, back and forth, hand outstretched to carry it. A stopover, a path, the time is sheltered, that of slowed speed. At the edge of the frozen lake, the ice cracks like a caramel veil. The frost sprinkles its opaline effects, a ray of light takes on the appearance of honey flakes, in the distance the city’s layered millefeuilles are coated with creamy words, meringue domes, chocolate opera cakes, delicate biscuits, in a sugary breath an umbrella appears with a red hat on its head, it laughs and flees leaving behind only a memory, that of an omelet fallen from the sky.
Jumping over a barrier like a sheep, crunching some sweets that look like agates, caramels, and rainbows, allowing oneself a window shopping trip with perched cats, turning a blindfolded circle at a roundabout, seeking the sky of a hopscotch hidden in the cobblestones. With its rules and its jubilations, the umbrella always wants to play, like an immense playground marked on the ground and without a net, one only needs to remember and join the game... when reality sets in rainy quarters, the asphalt blushes and the clouds start to sulk.
USER GUIDE List for the attention of awakened and distracted umbrella walkers: a cooler, a few lemons, three ladybugs, and ten bugle sounds, a compass with a polished leather case, a collection of vinyl records, a pure new wool bedspread, you add up, you mix, weigh the ephemeral, subtract from the gazes underlined with a black line, lift the immaculate, underpin archipelagos, smile at a memory, and hope that the rain never stops, see this line running on the wall, shake it to make peas, bridges, and omelets rain down, pull this landscape like a curtain, cut out thoughts, stick on smiles, seriousness packs its suitcase, and you will get this umbrella.
The cottony clouds of little joys and their blurry borders, like the boredom of a rainy day, the inventory is endless but the umbrella is indeed there. We see it. What a fabrication! What a funny idea! It still blushes, it calls to the senses, ignores autumn to slip into the avenues. It draws its parentheses. At the corner of our lives, at the end of the world. Because the world is made this way, of reflections, echoes, tête-à-têtes with the horizon, even and odd days, days without a raincoat but with an umbrella, the elements converge, signal each other, embrace or confront each other, trying to deceive solitude. The umbrella oils the tandem gears, takes parallel roads, gets an egg on its head, gets up, intersects, then leaves puddles at the feet of shoes.
