Roman Signer, Le Pendule, 2009, installation, 7 meters high, Trentemoult, Rezé, Nantes estuary/FR.
The Loire estuary is also an open-skied contemporary art center near the city of Nantes. A collection established according to a public commission program and the organization of multiple biennials. This cultural strategy aims to revivify this old fishing site, repurposed as an industrial park, now abandoned.
With Le Pendule, Roman Signer rehabilitates a disused factory, an artwork that is part of his particular interest in marginal spaces. This concrete factory was used to extract sand from the Loire River and transform it to build infrastructures. Its transformative function evokes the experimental aspect of Signer’s artistic approach. The abandoned steel building contrasts highly with the luxuriant vegetation around it. A scarlet metallic giant is asleep in this verdant space.
The Swiss artist produced a black seven-meter pendulum, attached to the building’s façade. An extension swinging relentlessly from side to side. This project, minimal and monumental at once, illustrates precisely Roman Signer’s plastic vocabulary. Le Pendule is not a classic clock. It’s an installation showing the passage of time: highlighting the slow decline of the remaining factory, while coinciding with the tide cycle, the flow of the river. Time attacking the building while being the ally of nature reasserting itself. The unstoppable swinging, like a ticking reminder, enhances this feeling of an impending disappearance.