How does one define abstraction?  Is it possible to really pin the concept down?  Let’s go beyond banalities which oppose the abstract to the concrete and tangible. The photographs which I present to you here are detached, outside the final composition, which is intentionally not shown.  What seduced me in this sculpture by Julio Le Parc, a Franco-Argentine artist, is the invitation to hear the internal pulse of the work.  It is impossible to enter the sculpture, which was created from thousands of squares of plexiglass. But one can clear a path of contemplation inside the sculpture.  The “reality” of the work is thus transformed thanks to the delicate balance between the form and color, which dance with the light and movement.  Each fragment enters a dialogue and becomes an echo of the whole. 

It is like entering the box, which the pilot in Antoine de Saint Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, finally draws, after becoming annoyed and exhausted by the repeated demands of the little prince to draw him a sheep.  All these “realistic” sketches earned reproaches from the little prince.  In a state of panic over his own survival in the middle of the desert, the pilot hastily scribbles a box, which he claims contains the sheep.  The little prince is delighted. It is exactly what he wanted. His sheep is protected. He can feed it and travel with it. It is there, while invisible at the same time. This story fascinated me when I was a child. It helped me to understand that whatever exists is not always visible. The box--a tangible object--is only a shape, a protecting envelope, that encloses the essential, meaning the invisible.