Les jeux sont faits – rien ne va plus – faites vos jeux

Eric Hattan (Wettingen, 1955)
Collection : Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain (FCAC), art&tram project

Eric Hattan is an artist of discretion and subtle diversion, whose practice of sculpture and video reveals details of our environment that usually escape our attention. His interventions often involve the displacement or modification of an existing object, and they insinuate themselves into our reality in a quirkily humorous way. It is in this spirit that he created the streetlamps that punctuate Route de Chancy for the art&tram project. Streetlamps are ordinary, functional objects that conform to a specific usage and integrate into city landscapes. Eric Hattan chose to alter their shape, introducing fantasy, absurdity, the unexpected: he selected eleven streetlamp poles from among the sixty that line this major throughway, in order to turn them into sculptural objects, each with its own circumvolutions. Crooked, falling, backward, coiled or cut up, each pole offers an unusual solution that introduces difference and surprise among objects that are usually uniform and monotonous. Thus reinterpreted, the lamps retain their utility as lights and tramway cable supports, while taking on a welcome playful element.
Article commissioned by P3Art
Notice: Séverine Fromaigeat, translation: Matthew Cunningham

Links: www.art-et-tram.ch
www.p3art.ch