Pierre Touré Cuq - Pyrame

Born in Biarritz in 1999, in 2023 from Villa Arson (Nice) and laureate of the Marguerite et Méthode Keskar 2023 prize. Pierre Touré Cuq lives and works in Paris.

At Pierre Touré Cuq, the symbol functions as an active tension: it becomes material to be diverted, to be defused, to be recharged. The entire body of work is anchored in a reflection on how forms, whether drawn from an ancient heritage or a contemporary vocabulary, crystallize narratives that are meant to waver. Falsehoods, blades, urban bollards, perfumes, constraint devices: as many sculptural elements reactivating an iconography of power and violence, following a logic of ambiguity and interpretative porosity. The relation to symbols draws notably on the heritage of Greco-Roman statuary, whose codes of authority, frozen beauty, and warlike glorification are deliberately diverted. Like ancient sculptures, the pieces inhabit a physical relationship with the viewer’s body. But where the ideal’s fixedness meets instability, fracture, and accident. Steel replaces marble; lines become dented, unbalanced, sometimes menacing, witnesses to a present that is struck, rather than relics of a triumphant past. No direct narration imposes itself: only suggestions emerge. Each proposition opens a space for interpretation. It is there that the viewer projects their conflicts, their narratives, their imaginaries. What is at stake then concerns an artistic gesture become an act of symbolic tension between collective memory, the politics of bodies, and resistant subjectivities. There is no intent to illustrate, but rather to question: what remains today of the symbolic power of forms? What can sculpture still do in a world saturated with images? Perhaps this: to force seeing differently what signs fix, and to reintroduce trouble into it.

Description of the work
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This blade has a name, “Pyrame,” in reference to the myth of Pyrame and Thisbé, told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This double-edged blade, sustained by brambles, compels the person who would use it to wound to wound themselves. It symbolizes the passion that can devour certain of our relationships and refers to the destructive dynamics that can settle within them.