The context

The artist's intervention is envisaged in order to contribute to the requalification of a port in the Burgundy Canal and its rebirth as a river stopover for tourism. As part of the site development project, two landscape architects, Olivier Marty and Elisabeth Ferron, are in charge of the exteriors.

The commission

The lighting only works in the evening and at night. It consists of a succession of eleven columns of light fixed to the facades of the built front, which leaves the other part of the landscape, the other bank, "open". Faced with a technical problem, Verjux cannot solve it by using its usual intervention mode, the projector. The mediator puts him in contact with Philips. Verjux then discovered a new technology that he adopted : lamps installed in a transparent tube allowed him to obtain a soft and regular light. The realization of the luminous columns will thus mark a turning point in his artistic practice. The verticality of these eleven columns also contrasts with the horizontality of the canal, interrupting and scoring a rhythmic designating the overall structure of the site. Verjux wanted to avoid favouring any point of view: "Lighting, the light intervention is perceived both from the inside when walking in the site and from the outside when arriving by road or by water".

Michel Verjux

The mediator proposes the artist Michel Verjux, a former student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon. Since the early eighties, light has been the preferred medium for Verjux's creation. It is an abstract approach, economical in its means. The light projected on screens shows the act of exhibiting and becomes a work of art itself. Although Verjux had already designed ephemeral works outdoors, responding to this commission asked him to confront a new situation: "It was the first time I had done something outdoors that had to last, which is more difficult".