The context

The Saint-Joseph hospital has known for several years a vast reorganization program. Because of the Parent-Children Pole construction, the hospital wished to order an artistic work which announces the building in urban space and accommodates the users.

The Commission

A glowing façade. In response to the hospital's request to reinforce the architectural presence of its new Parent-Child Center and to improve visitors' stay through the addition of a work of art, Gérard Traquandi proposed a work that is at once an image and a light phenomenon. Inspired by sonogram images and satellite photographs of stars, Traquandi proposed installing a glowing screen made up of millions of dots of light in the form of a fetus sonogram over the entire surface of one of the building's walls. The project was delayed by a modification in the hospital's original architectural project. A new location has since been found with the architect's cooperation and the project can now move ahead.

The project has a double intention : to produce an image and to be a phenomenon of light, intimately linked to the architecture on which it is exposed. Two iconographic sources were the cause of the image and the techniques used: firstly the sonogram, which I consider the most contemporary representation of the "mother and child", and secondly, celestial images, captured by satellites, searching for the birth of the universe. If the relationship between a sonogram and a representation of the universe is a primary truth, it is what connects them, their sparkle, that inspired my approach. I defined a photographic layout in which the sonogram image stays recognizable from afar, to become, upon looking more closely, a "constellation" of glowing dots. Gérard Traquandi, 2005.

Georges Traquandi

Born in 1952 in Marseilles, Gérard Traquandi divides his time between Paris and Marseilles. As a painter, he explores the so-called "classic" genres of painting: still- life, portraiture, landscape. Rather than using immediate and direct identification, his self-defined goal is to represent his subjects rather as a game of sensory and psychological effects produced by a combination of forms, materials and colors.