Une âme is a bronze cast of a small wooden stool made by my father in the mid-1990s. The bronze casting preserves the traces of use imprinted on the original artefact, fixing them in time in a resistant material.
The stool has been part of my life since I was a boy: it first followed my family of origin through several moves and later continued to be part of my daily life and that of my wife and daughter. The original stool is still in our home, holding up a stack of books, and will continue to slowly transform over time, while its bronze copy will remain crystallised at the age of thirty.
On one side of the work is what, in the original, is a piece of paper held in place by two drawing pins; above it is engraved the phrase Le présent n'exist pas, referring to the fate of the work, which exists outside of time, and to the way in which the present is so fleeting that one moment it is the future and the next it is the past. It is a time that is impossible to stop, in a continuous planning of what will be and rethinking of what has been.
Objects retain traces of what has been, of the moods of those who handled them, of the desire of those who wanted them and the rejection of those who abandoned them.
The title of the work comes from a sentence in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's London that describes this very well:

'Elle est dure la peine qui monte des objets quand personne ne veut plus d'eux. On n'a ni défense, ni rigueur pour l'ameublement. La mort d'un ornement c'est la mort d'une âme. Un peu de grimace et de honte et c'est fini.'
(The pain of objects is hard when no one wants them anymore. We have neither defence nor firmness when it comes to furniture. The death of a piece of furniture is the death of a soul. A quick grimace of shame and it's over.)