The context

Following the death of two of their friends who were hit by a car on a scooter, teenagers in a village express their anger at the lack of consideration they receive. The idea was born to pay them their "own tribute" and to solicit an artist to create a monument on the village's playground where young people are used to meeting.

The commission

The artist creates two identical six-metre high polished concrete obelisks, installed at both ends of a diagonal crossing the playing field. One of their edges is truncated to allow a person to enter. The interior space of each obelisk is painted according to the favourite colours and emblems of one of the two young people. The top ends with a glass structure illuminated by the ground. On one of the outer faces is engraved "86 03", numbers that correspond to the date of birth and death of the two friends and their family name.

Steven Gontarski

Born in Philadelphia in 1974, Steven Gontarski is mainly a sculptor. Often figurative, sometimes abstract, he uses synthetic materials for mono-coloured works. Busts or figures standing upright with a deformed or shredded appearance, cellular or atomic elements, his sculptures have a strangeness that owes as much to fantastic cinema as to the trajectory of biomorphic abstraction.