Tristan DeLacour - Wall mirror - Pinewood, Oak

Wounded Mirror;

Sculptural work on an antique mirror
A sculptural artwork created from an antique 19th-century mirror, whose shape and proportions are rooted in the Louis-Philippe style mirror heritage.
The original mirror has been repurposed as a support for a complete artistic transformation, straddling the boundary between sculpture, contemporary art, and functional furniture.
The work preserves its original function: the mirror remains usable and still allows one to look at oneself. But its frame has been intentionally assaulted, burned, pierced, torn, and augmented with various elements in order to radically alter its reading.

A “wounded” mirror
The principle of the work rests on a simple idea: to wound the object that reflects our own image.
The frame physically bears the traces of this intervention. Some parts of the wood have been deeply scorched, others only exposed to flame to obtain different blacks and textures.
Carbonization reveals, in places, a cracked surface almost like leather, while the moldings and the imperfections of the antique mirror remain visible.
The burnt wood was then stabilized to visually preserve the effects of carbonization while limiting soot deposits and dark traces during handling.
Nails, barbed wire, fragments of saw blades, and various metallic elements penetrate or constrain the frame.
These materials draw directly on the visual vocabulary of punk and industrial aesthetics: subversion, violence done to the object, exposed metal, DIY clearing of the finish, and a rejection of an overly pristine finish.

To this punk register responds a more Gothic dimension, notably through the presence of candles, wax, deep blacks, and the almost funerary aspect of the composition.
Interventions evoking blood and wounds complete this vocabulary.

The reflection as an integral part of the work
The violence inflicted on the frame is not merely decorative.
The mirror is an object intimately linked to the person who observes it.
Unlike a traditional sculpture that one looks at from the outside, the spectator appears inside the work as soon as they approach it.
The frame has been wounded, but it is our own reflection that it contains.
The burns, perforations, tears, and scars surrounding the glass become, symbolically, those of the person who looks at themselves.
The work can thus be understood as a representation of how wounds, accidents, and lived experiences accumulate around identity without necessarily destroying it.
The mirror continues to fulfill its function despite the interventions it has undergone.
This permanence is essential to the composition: the object is damaged, transformed, and marked, yet it continues to return an image.
A deliberately preserved dark spill on the glass also participates in this intervention and should not be considered a defect or an accidental deterioration.

A work between art and furniture
This piece is conceived as a work of art in its own right, but deliberately retains its character as furniture. It can be hung and used as a mirror while, through its presence and materials, functioning as a significant wall sculptural composition.
The contrast between the antique mirror, traditionally associated with the elegance of a bourgeois 19th-century interior, and the contemporary interventions — fire, metal, nails, barbed wire, blades, and wax — constitutes a fundamental part of the work.
The aim was not to restore the mirror, nor to erase its age or imperfections, but rather to use its history, its marks, and its material as a starting point for a new piece.
The irregularities, burns, cracks, perforations, wax traces, and visible interventions on the frame are an integral part of the artistic composition and are deliberately preserved.