10.2023 and 11.2023 are elongated wall sculptures made from aluminium and reflective fabric. Activated by light, their surfaces register subtle movements in the surrounding space. Passing bodies, shifting reflections and changes in illumination continually reshape what we see.
Over the course of a year, Pauline Cordier observed the patch of sunlight cast through a single window at midday. Day after day, season after season, its shape shifted almost imperceptibly, registering the Earth’s movement around the sun. The wall sculptures emerge from that sustained observation.
The works’ responsiveness to changing light recalls the Impressionists’ attention to the instability of perception, as well as Josef Albers’s distinction between factual colour – the physical colour of an object – and actual colour, the colour we experience under particular conditions. It also connects the works to phenomenology, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception as embodied and situated.
Describing tiles seen through the water of a swimming pool, Merleau-Ponty writes that he does not see them despite the water and its reflections, but “through them and because of them”. The ripples and distortions do not prevent him from seeing the tiles as they are; they are part of the conditions through which the tiles become visible.
Similarly, 10.2023 and 11.2023 cannot be separated from the changing light, the surrounding architecture or the viewer’s body. These elements do not obscure the works: they continually bring them into being. Like Albers and Merleau-Ponty, Cordier invites us to consider not simply whether what we see is real, but how reality becomes perceptible to us in the first place.
Rather than presenting a finished image, the light-reflective surfaces mirror whatever stands before them. The viewer, the architecture and the changing light all become part of the work, ensuring that no two encounters are ever the same.
What begins as an observation of a single beam of sunlight becomes something much broader: a reminder that every space is in constant flux. Even the most familiar room is never truly the same twice, quietly reshaped by time, weather and the presence of those who move through it.
Pauline Cordier (b. 1992) is a French artist who lives and works in Switzerland. A graduate of the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD), she creates sculptures and installations that encourage us to look again at the spaces we usually take for granted. Her work has been exhibited in Switzerland and internationally, including France, Italy, the United States and South Korea. Several of her public commissions are permanently installed in Switzerland.
Text by Maria Myasnikova