Michel Paysant (b. 1955, Bouzonville, France) creates projects that straddle art and science, building bridges to craftsmanship, the history of techniques, and the development of cutting-edge technology. In the mid-1980s, he started taking an interest in bituminous asphalt as an artistic material. He was attracted to its ‘magical, strong and secretive’ qualities, ‘its powers of suggestion, of evocation, its history and its memory’ and was intrigued by it to the point of wanting ‘to totally exhaust its substance’. Asphalt, this ‘poor’, hydrocarbon-based material which has been used since ancient times to caulk ships or embalm the dead, came to be used in the invention of photography and was eventually used to pave roads in modern times. It is a nearly unlimited source of symbolism, which Paysant draws on for many of his works.

With his installation Nusquam (lat.: nowhere), Michel Paysant tackles the themes of the hospitality, of the other and emigration, through a free and poetic vision of the notion of “country of asylum”. Inspired by Utopia (1516) by Thomas More (1478–1535), Nusquam should be considered as “an active waiting room”, an intermediary space where one can relax, in which one submerges oneself and where one can listen. Thus, Nusquam represents a fictional threshold of a different world, the foundations of which are anchored in an open conception of Europe. This assembly of various elements, which is the fruit of a close collaboration with different partners, combines numerous literary, historical and symbolic references and is reminiscent of baroque curiosity cabinets.

Peradam was originally made in 2007 as part of Nusquam. Its title refers to the unfinished utopian novel Mount Analogue (1939–44) by René Daumal (1908–1944), in which a mysterious precious stone is visible only to those who seek it. Paysant’s video animation is made of fifty-five slowly morphing asphalt fragments from great European roadways. This sequence of bitumen fragments – including Frankfurt’s Börsenplatz, the Mitrovica bridge in Kosovo, the European institutions of Luxembourg, etc. – takes us along an endless imaginary road across the continent.

La Grande Réserve III (1995) is part of a series of three sculptures bearing the same name. Each consists of a thick sheet of glass cut to form the outline of a French curve: a template used in manual draughting and in fashion design to draw smooth curves of varying radii. The tool is here scaled-up for the three-metre sculpture. The french title refers to the painting The Great Enclosure (Das Große Gehege, 1832), by Caspar David Friedrich (1774 –1840) that depicts a marshy landscape in the glow of the setting sun, reflected in the flooded plain. Paysant’s sculpture plays variously with the idea of reflection and transparency. When presented lying on the floor or on a black plinth, its reflective surface mirrors elements of the surrounding space. When placed against a wall, it becomes transparent, rendering visible the architecture of the place.