In Mes nuits souciantes (My Troubled Nights), Alain Quesnel sought to compose an installation both intimate and unsettling, where each element seems suspended in silent tension. The work unfolds in semi-darkness, revealing a mental space where the viewer is invited to sit — quite literally — in front of love, memory, and unease. Through a rigorous staging and a controlled economy of signs, the artist offers an immersive piece that explores the tensions between memory, desire, and solitude.
At the heart of the installation, a solitary golden chair faces a constellation of suspended pages, extracted from Ovid’s The Art of Love. This choice is far from trivial: Ovid, ancient poet of desire and seduction, becomes here a spectral guide, his words floating in the air like unfinished thoughts or fragments of memory. The suspension of the pages evokes an impossible reading, a search for meaning hindered by time or anxiety. The viewer, invited to sit, becomes a contemplative reader, caught in a night where love is both present and elusive, highlighting the distance between past injunctions and present uncertainties.
On the walls, trident hooks hold water pouches sealed with copper wire. This device, both brutal and delicate, introduces a physical and symbolic tension. Water, vital and fluid, becomes here liquid memory — perhaps tears or reminiscences. The copper wire, a conductor of energy, connects each pouch to its hook, as if each memory were electrified, ready to trigger pain or revelation. The hooks, instruments of capture, suggest latent violence: that of attachment, of memory, or of love itself.
The entire installation plays on the contrast between apparent lightness (floating pages, transparent pouches) and the gravity of symbols (tridents, metal wire, darkness). As often in his interventions, Alain Quesnel has used simple materials charged with connotations (paper, metal, water, light) to construct a space of reflection where the viewer is invited to project their own narratives. He probes the nights of the soul — those where desire mingles with unease, where reading becomes introspection, and where everyday objects transform into powerful metaphors.
Mes nuits souciantes articulates a poetics of intimacy with formal rigor; it belongs to a tradition of narrative and psychic installation. It does not seek to illustrate a message, but to make it felt — in silence, in waiting, in suspension…
Nella Esquian – 2025 / Exposition Il suono delle pietre / Chapelle Sainte Anne Tours-La Riche 2025