Some transformations herald a crash. Others begin with a color. In March 2022, the Abode of Chaos enters a new period in its artistic history.

The pink appears.

At first glance, the gesture might seem almost provocative, so stark is it in contrast to more than twenty years of rust, black, grey, burnt metal, scars, bunkers, craters, and architecture marked by the aesthetics of catastrophe. But precisely, it is not about provocation.

This is a move.

The Abode of Chaos was never for me an apocalyptic setting intended to endlessly repeat the same signs.

It works in History.

It absorbs it. It transforms it. It records the fractures of the world and builds its own grammar with them. But, from 2022 onwards, something in the world poses a new question.

War is returning to the heart of Europe.

Ukraine.

The trenches.

The bombings.

The destroyed cities.

Image streams.

Drones.

The mobilization of industries.

The reappearance of a vocabulary that Europe sometimes believed belonged to the 20th century. And behind this real war, an old strategic question resurfaces:

How far can the escalation go?

I think back to Clausewitz. To absolute war. To this logic of escalation to extremes in which each adversary is driven to surpass the other until no internal limit of the system is sufficient to stop the acceleration.

This mechanism has long interested me because it belongs precisely to Chaos. Two forces clash. Every movement produces a counter-movement. Every intensification calls for a greater intensification.

The system can theoretically tend towards the extreme.

Political, social, economic, and human realities certainly introduce resistance. But the logic remains. And I ask myself a very simple question:

What does a work that has been working on war for more than twenty years do when it does not want to become a prisoner of war?

It needs to change.

Otherwise, it becomes repetitive. Repetition, for me, is a form of death. A living work must be able to transform its own vocabulary at the very moment that vocabulary risks becoming predictable.

Pink was born in this space.

Not as a decoration. Not as a softening. Not as a denial of the aesthetics of catastrophe.

Like a chromatic counter-offensive.

The initial impulse was both artistic and political: to introduce into the system a color capable of disrupting a grammar that had become too predictable. The rediscovered depth, the reappearing spectral forms, and the effects produced from within the Sentinels came later. The material taught us what intuition had not yet fully grasped.

For two decades, rust had exerted a formidable plasticity. It had become almost the natural skin of the Abode of Chaos. It spoke of time, corrosion, wounds, war, industry, aging matter, the world after the event. But precisely because it had become so deeply ingrained in the identity, it could also become a trap.

A work can ultimately be recognized by what it repeats. It is at this point that it must be able to betray itself enough to remain true to itself.

So I am introducing pink.

A color that almost no one would spontaneously associate with the Abode of Chaos. That is precisely why it interests me.

It immediately produces tension.

Pink meets rust. It does not erase it. It forces it to redefine itself.

Color does not replace war with a naive vision of peace. That would be too simplistic. Pink is far more ambiguous.

It can be tender, violent, acidic, artificial, organic, or erotic.

Pop, childlike, medical, toxic, protective, almost religious depending on the context.

Its power stems precisely from this impossibility of reducing it to a single meaning. I did not want to paint the Abode of Chaos "in pink" as one might repaint a facade. I wanted to introduce into its system a variable strong enough to shift the relationships between the forms.

This is where the experience truly begins.

Because a purely visual intuition is never enough. It must be made to work with matter. And matter resists.

For about three years, we experimented.

The shades of pink.

The supports.

The formulations.

Reactions with materials.

Durability.

The light.

The differences between the theoretical color and what it becomes when it encounters rust, steel, concrete, and old surfaces. We conduct tests. We go back. We compare. We reject. We start again.

The Abode of Chaos has its own laboratories, its own protocols, its own material histories

A color that would work on a neutral surface can become completely different when it enters an environment saturated with rusts, blacks, greys, earths, vegetation, and natural light.

I did not want a decorative pink.

I wanted an active color.

A color that alters the structure of perception. The technical dimension determines how well the color holds up over time. A monumental work exposed to the elements cannot be painted like an interior object.

Light, humidity, and temperature change.

Rain, UV rays and corrosion take their toll.

The substrates are not homogeneous; the materials react.

We need to understand what the color will do over time.

With Nadège, this research grows more complex. She goes deeply into chromatics, formulations, the relationships between color and matter, and the tests themselves.

She works with chemists.

She takes multiple samples.

She observes behaviors.

She revisits the works.

She observes what the pink produces in the morning, at noon, in the evening.

Under the grey sky.

Under the sun.

After the rain.

In the shadows.

Under artificial lighting.

This dimension might seem secondary. However, it directly impacts how color exists in the space.

A color never exists in isolation.

It exists within a system of relationships.

The same shade of pink can appear almost fluorescent against a dark rust and become much softer when it meets the stone.

It can advance a form.

Push back another one.

To create a break.

Open a visual passage.

To reveal a depth that no longer existed.

And that is when something else happened, something I absolutely did not anticipate when the Abode of Chaos was born.

The rust had aged.

It seems obvious. It was not.

For twenty-five years, I had sourced steels from across Europe. They did not share the same histories, thicknesses, compositions, or surface conditions. Some reached considerable thicknesses, on the order of 150 to 300 millimeters. For the monumental sculpture installation À en perdre le Nord, an exceptional thickness was worked in the laboratory and at the factory to reach 1,000 mm. Others were around 50 millimeters.

They had been subjected to acids, various treatments, weathering, sun, frost, rain, and humidity. Originally, each one had its own patina.

Each sculpture therefore had its own skin.

These differences naturally generated planes. One mass stood out from another. A sculpture appeared in front of a structure. One form revealed a second behind it.

The diversity of oxidations contributed, without my necessarily having theorized it as such at the outset, to the general depth of field of the Abode of Chaos.

Then decades passed. And my eye grew accustomed.

This is one of the strangest traps awaiting the author of a work in which he lives. By constantly looking at something, one can end up no longer seeing it. Like in cinema, when one has spent too much time watching the same images, the brain already knows the shot.

It anticipates.

It simplifies.

It eliminates from its attention what it considers to be taken for granted. I gradually discovered that a second phenomenon had been added to this habituation of the gaze.

The rust itself had moved closer together.

Despite the extraordinary diversity of the steels and initial treatments, after approximately twenty-five years of exposure and aging, a form of chromatic uniformity had emerged. I interviewed engineers to understand what I was observing. They explained to me the phenomena of aging and the evolution of the oxidation layers over timescales measured precisely in decades.

I could see the result before me. What had been a multitude of patinas was beginning to produce a common dominant color.

Rust had won.

But in winning, it had also flattened the space.

Sculptures that I had created were still there physically, and yet, visually, they had almost disappeared.

They had become spectral.

They existed without being seen.

This discovery deeply disturbed me. Because we are talking about thousands of works. Some forms had gradually faded into the background until they merged with it.

A totem in front of a rusty structure, then another rusty structure behind it, could end up belonging to a single chromatic mass.

The eye could no longer cut.

It was merging.

The Abode of Chaos still possessed its three physical dimensions, but part of its plastic depth of field had closed in. And that is where the pink produced something I had not anticipated at the beginning.

It did not just add a color.

It restored space to space.

When we started gradually introducing a few pink elements, then more, then dozens, then hundreds of dots, I saw the plans reappear. Sometimes a small area was enough.

A pink hue in the foreground pushed back the rust behind it.

A punctuation mark located further away drew the eye into the depths.

Another, almost tiny, revealed a neighboring sculpture that suddenly seemed to return to the surface of perception.

As these interventions multiplied, a new geography emerged. Thousands, and potentially tens of thousands, of small touches could construct what I would almost call the hinterland of the Abode of Chaos.

The gaze was no longer stopped by a monochrome mass.

It was travelling.

Foreground. Middle ground. Background.

A gate. An opening. A totem.

A structure behind the totem. Then another shape even further away.

Pink had become an instrument of depth. It was then that one of the most pleasurable phenomena of this experience occurred.

Some works have returned.

I am obviously not talking about works that have physically disappeared. I am talking about works that my own eye had stopped noticing. Nadège and I have started revisiting certain spaces.

We were coming back.

We set off again.

We were looking at it from a different angle.

We were shifting our perspective.

And suddenly sculptures appeared, of which I could almost say: I had forgotten they were there.

This has happened to me in particular with certain initiation totems.

Yet I had conceived them. They belonged to my work. They had been in front of me for years. And I no longer saw them.

The color pink brought them back to life.

This experience taught me something considerable about looking.

A work of art can disappear without moving.

It is enough for its perceptual environment to cease allowing the eye to distinguish it. Conversely, modifying a few chromatic relationships can bring back a form that had never ceased to exist.

It is almost an archaeology of the gaze.

We are not unearthing anything from the ground. We are unearthing forms of perception.

The visitors felt it too.

Some people expressed their astonishment at what they perceived as a recent proliferation of works: according to them, there were so many new things. But not everything was new. Some of it had always been there.

What was new was the possibility of seeing it.

After the pink airplane, Nadège and I wanted to continue the re-enchantment of the Abode of Chaos through the living world. An old passion of mine awakened once again: to seed the Abode of Chaos, to bring nature into it not as decoration, but as a constitutive material of the work itself.

I had always been fascinated by Las Pozas, in Xilitla, Mexico, that surrealist garden where architecture and vegetation seem to have engendered one another. And the olive tree has always accompanied me. It comes from my native Provence; I have encountered olive trees in every corner of the world, and I remain convinced that they are among the most beautiful trees on Earth. Dalí’s olive trees had already fixed this presence within me: the twisting of the trunks, the violence and wisdom of matter, time made visible.

With Nadège, we therefore conceived Gethsémani, The Path of the Olive Trees: eighteen exceptional trees, several centuries old and some approaching a thousand years, planted not beside the artworks but within the artworks themselves, at the very heart of the 9,000-square-meter museum itinerary.

What might have appeared to be a landscaping project became a construction site lasting almost two years. These trees, weighing several tons each, demanded almost surgical precision. At times we had to excavate as deep as five meters, create spaces roughly three and a half meters in diameter, reconstruct suitable soil conditions with Mediterranean earth, stones and drainage, organize the lifting operations, maneuver heavy machinery among monumental sculptures, and determine, for each of the eighteen olive trees, the one place where its presence would seem to have always been inevitable.

Because each olive tree became a work of art. Around every one of them, we recomposed the space: steel, paint, graffiti, sculptures, the memory of people and the memory of the place. One pays tribute to loved ones who have passed away and who belong to the history of the Abode of Chaos; another evokes Provence; each possesses its own constellation. The living tree never comes to conceal the pre-existing work: it enters into dialogue with it.

The most extraordinary phenomenon came afterward. The olive-tree specialists who had accompanied us believed that these ancient specimens would require many years of assistance before re-establishing their root autonomy. Yet within two or three years, they quite literally exploded with vitality. Today, visitors are convinced that they have stood there for a century. No one could imagine the monumental undertaking required to produce such an impression of inevitability.

That was precisely what Nadège and I were seeking: for the intervention itself to disappear behind the rightness of its presence. For a thousand-year-old olive tree and a steel sculpture weighing dozens of tons to cease belonging to two separate worlds. For nature, rust, concrete, paint and memory to become part of one and the same organism.

Years earlier, I had announced that the Abode of Chaos would ultimately be re-enchanted through an abundance of vegetation. Gethsémani became one of the most radical answers to that promise.

The Chaos had not been erased. It had begun to bloom again.

This phrase became one of the keys to the pink period for me. Colour did not only create new works or new relationships.

It reactivated what already existed.

It restored a visual existence to forms that twenty-five years of chromatic convergence had gradually absorbed.

And Nadège played a crucial role in this research. We progressed together through this increasingly complex chromatic system.

She was watching.

She was returning to the scene.

She compared the samples.

She worked with chemists.

She followed the formulations.

She was trying out multiple things.

Her relationship to pink itself became highly particular. Then she had a remarkable intuition:

Paint the inside of the Sentinels pink.

The gesture shifted the problem even further. It was no longer simply a matter of applying color to an external surface. It was necessary to create color from within a form.

We added the light.

The Sentinels then became almost bodies containing their own chromatic source. And the phenomenon was even stranger than expected: even in broad daylight, even without the intervention of the LEDs, the inner pink produced a remarkable vibration.

Natural light was coming in.

It encountered the colored surface.

It started again in a different way.

The sculpture no longer carried only color.

It seemed to be containing it.

Nadège had opened up a new level of interpretation. From then on, pink definitively ceased to be a simple opposition to the brown of rust. It became a spatial tool.

A revelation.

A producer of depth.

A way to get the eye moving.

A way to illuminate a form from within itself.

A possibility of reactivating works that have become almost invisible.

That is why I now consider this decision one of the most accomplished mental feats of my work on The Abode of Chaos. I had not anticipated all the consequences. What interests me is precisely the opposite.

I developed a plastic hypothesis. We experimented with it for years. The material responded to us.

Nadège pushed it in new directions.

Sydney has developed certain interpretations of this in his mediations.

The visitors produced their own interpretations. And the work itself gradually revealed effects that I had not all anticipated.

That too is part of the cosa mentale. Strong thinking does not consist of predicting every consequence of what it brings into being. It consists of building a system coherent enough so that the unexpected can become fruitful within it.

Pink has become this: an idea, then a material, then a technique, then a depth, then a light.

Then a new way of looking at twenty-five years of work. It also produces a political shift in the broadest sense of the term.

For over twenty years, the Abode of Chaos has incorporated the convulsions of the world.

War is omnipresent there.

Not because I love it. Because it constitutes one of the great transformative forces in human History.

The bunkers.

The carcasses.

Registrations.

The portraits.

Traces of destruction.

Memories of conflicts.

All of this stems from the desire to make the Abode of Chaos a seismograph of its time. But a seismograph's function is not to desire earthquakes. It records them. It makes them legible. And sometimes it allows us to consider what might disrupt its logic.

Pink then takes the form of a countermovement.

Faced with the rise to extremes, a color that does not respond with an intensification of the same language. That is what interests me.

When war increases, should war be depicted more?

Maybe.

But we can also introduce a variable into the system that disrupts the obvious. Pink accomplishes this.

It takes certain structures from the perpetual war and imposes a different interpretation on them.

It does not disarm them materially.

It disarms them semiologically.

A shape that immediately evoked a weapon, a defense, a fortification, or an architecture of conflict can suddenly be traversed by a color that prevents automatic reading.

The gaze must begin its work again.

That is exactly what I am looking for. I want the work to raise questions rather than seek to provoke.

Pink raises questions because it is not where we expect it. It catches the viewer off guard.

What is this color doing here? Why now?

Is it ironic, political, peaceful, violent?

Is it a repair, an injury, a protection?

A mutation?

I do not want to choose for the viewer. I want to open up the space.

The Pink Period thus becomes much more than a chromatic period. It is a change of regime. For a long time, rust had constituted a kind of basso continuo. Pink introduces a polyphony.

It does not destroy the past.

It forces it to become a contemporary of itself.

A living work cannot simply accumulate years. It must be able to re-examine its own forms from the present.

Pink does that.

It revisits twenty-five years of material. It rereads it. It shifts it. It brings spectral forms into view. It produces backgrounds. It reorganizes the territory. And above all, it shows that the Abode of Chaos possesses a capacity that organizes its entire history: mutation.

Only mutants survive.

This principle is not a decorative formula at the Abode of Chaos. It describes a law of operation. An organism that cannot adapt to its changing environment eventually disappears. The same goes for businesses. The same goes for thought. The same goes for art.

In 2022, the Abode of Chaos could perfectly well continue to produce rust. It knew how to do it. Its vocabulary was established. Its image was identifiable. Its audience immediately recognized its aesthetic. This was precisely the dangerous moment.

When everyone already knows what you look like, you can start to become your own cliché.

The pink color shattered that possibility.

It forced the Abode of Chaos to become unpredictable again. And it forced me to become an observer again. Perhaps that is what interests me most about this adventure.

I am the sole author of the entire work that forms the Total Work of Art of the Abode of Chaos, and I hold its conceptual authority. I know its cosa mentale. I know the thousands of decisions that produced its forms. And yet, the work can still surprise me.

It can show me something I had not anticipated.

It can restore to me a sculpture that I had stopped seeing.

It may force Nadège and me to return to the same place several times to understand what just happened.

It can lead Sydney, in mediation, to produce other interpretations.

It can make a visitor see something I had not thought of.

At that point, the work is truly alive. It no longer merely executes the author's intention. It produces consequences stemming from that intention. I do not confuse this with a loss of authorship.

The cosa mentale remains.

Conceptual architecture remains.

But the strength of a thought is also measured by what it can generate beyond the immediate expectation of the one who formulated it.

I received very strong external confirmation of this very early on.

In July 2022, after a visit to the Abode of Chaos, Gilles Blanckaert, a great collector, great donor and observer whose almost cutting critical standards I have long known, wrote me a message which, in retrospect, seems extraordinarily accurate.

He speaks of a "youthful freshness." Of a "breath of fresh air." Then he uses a word:

"Revealing".

As in photography, he writes, pink awakens the eye and broadens the vision.

He adds that I broke a uniformity of the Abode of Chaos that could harm its burning relevance and that this pink constitutes "a very Pop point of support" making visible "what tended not to stand out in the DDC Space".

And he concluded:

“It’s a fundamentally artistic approach, and I would even add, a political one.” This statement dates from July 2022. That’s what gives it a particular value today. We were at the beginning of this transformation. Yet, the mechanism was already perceptible from the outside: breaking the uniformity, awakening perception, making visible what had ceased to stand out.

Gilles's perspective mattered all the more to me because I knew perfectly well he would not cut me any slack. His frankness has always been as sharp as a blade. I knew the quality of his eye for contemporary art. I knew that such a radical chromatic shift in the Abode of Chaos could just as easily provoke a brutal rejection from him. That is why his change of heart affected me so deeply.

This was not the compliment of a close friend confirming a decision already made. It was the perspective of a potential dissenter. Of the connoisseur. Of the collector who had learned to see works within their history, their risks, and their ruptures.

And he had perceived almost immediately what Nadège and I would then spend years experiencing, discussing, and experimenting with in theses and counter-theses: The pink did not only change the color of the Abode of Chaos.

It changed its visibility. It changed its depth. It changed the very nature of the gaze.

The following years would allow us to understand the extent of this intuition. The pink forced me to look at my own work again. And perhaps that is its most dizzying effect. After twenty-five years, the Abode of Chaos needed more than just a new perspective from the world.

It had succeeded in forcing its own author to look at it again.

While this plastic transformation unfolds, another perspective also begins to shift: that of the State. This change will be much slower. It will take several years before it takes institutional form.