Guy Limone
25 SUR 1500 DES MIGRANTS DANS LE MONDE…
1500 painted plastic elements
2009

25 SUR 1500 DES MIGRANTS DANS LE MONDE SONT DES MAROCAINS. 1500 painted plastic elements (ech 1/87e) threaded on a fishing line, 480 cm high. Courtesy: The artist.

The “Threads” are like abacuses whose balls have been replaced by small sculptures representing characters. Here, 25 figurines painted with minute detail (The Moroccans) are lost among 1475 others, each one painted a bright color. I created this sculpture in Morocco, traditionally a country of emigration, but which is increasingly becoming a country of immigration. A multitude of colors that evoke a great variety of cultures of course, but also the traveling painters that color- ed Western art through their extensive voyages (Delacroix, Gauguin, Klee...). A statistic taken from the press is thus visualized, sculpted. The great length of the thread enables the vertigo that characterizes our world, constantly inventoried and yet elusive.

About the artist

Guy Limone Born in 1958 in Villefranche sur Sâone. He lives and works in Paris. From afar, Guy Limone’s paintings, sculptures, and installations read as minimalist and monochromatic; up close, they reveal an artistic practice centered on obsessions—with demographics and statistics, color and categorization, and miniatures. Taking as his launch point such arbitrary statistics as “160 out of 1000 Americans own a pass- port,” or “18.8% of Greeks are obese,” Limone crafts 3D infographics that visualize this data, usually through the use of tiny, handpainted plastic figurines, strung together or arranged in intricate tabletop tableaux; in his 1996 installation 67,857 inhabitants per sq. mile, he visualized the average share of Manhattan’s land for each of its in- habitants. Working as a taxonomist as much as an artist, Limone also crafts monochromatic collages that mix images of famous artworks with fragments from mass media—asserting an aesthetic order on a world that is inundated with information and imagery.

No items found.

25 SUR 1500 DES MIGRANTS DANS LE MONDE SONT DES MAROCAINS. 1500 painted plastic elements (ech 1/87e) threaded on a fishing line, 480 cm high. Courtesy: The artist.