55.

55.... And in future, not 60, 100 or 120, but 89 cubes, all the same size - 1.25 by 1.25 metres. What on earth prompted sculptor Eric Ferber to embark on this wild artistic and mathematical adventure of spectacular cube creations?

The perpetual quest for harmony based on the Fibonacci sequence, with a number that's both mathematical and mythical: 1.618....The golden ratio, the key to balance, the secret of harmony, can be found at the heart of Mayan constructions, in the architecture of Le Corbusier and even in nature with the sunflower's flower heads.

Perched on a point as if ready to levitate, each of these cubes shares the same dimension, but the cube principle is transcended by a singular formal approach unique to each of them. The result is a play of full and empty, as if to question the foundations of balance and materialize the enigma of the principle of harmony. Some are literally boned, becoming the skeleton of a square, the most common geometric figure alongside its rival, the circle. Radical minimalism is countered by the playful comfort of an XXL die, woven in Corten, or our planet squared as if human fractures had been healed, if not prevented. Contradictory lines are reconciled, the curve weaving its way through the cubes to soften their rigor and soothe them of its brutal rigor.

As he embarks on this epic quest for balance, Eric Ferber has not forgotten his love for the sensuality of curves, nor his predilection for Corten, a material steeped in history that transforms with the passing of light and time.

If reinventing the notion of the cube, piece after piece, is at the very least a creative headache that Eric Ferber is pugnaciously tackling, the 55 cubes currently being designed are a poetic compendium of opposing viewpoints: the battle of fastidious geometry with the intertwining of lines ready to escape into the slightest interstice, the adornment of motifs with the undressing of a skeleton pointing to the essentials of things, time narrated by Corten, ageing interrupted by the seasons to prefigure a new youth, the obstacle to the thread of numbers overcome by inventiveness... On closer inspection, these creations are in themselves a palimpsest of lines that tell the true story of life, encouraging us to pause and define the essential, as if to better find our point of balance.

Nicole Maïon