Emmanuelle Moureaux is obsessed with numbers. And colors. And using both to “express time, experiences, and emotions,” the architect-artist says. Timeline, her recent installation, and her first permanent one in Paris, goes further to “symbolize the diversity of people and moments of life.” Fittingly, Timeline occupies the eight-story atrium of Le Lumière, the city’s largest private office building that’s also home to restaurants, shops, Kedge business school, and parking facilities, averaging thousands of visitors a month.
To produce the commission curated by By Art, Moureaux engineered a custom frame, attached to the atrium’s truss beams, from which 3,200 steel numbers are suspended in tidy rows. The bottom-most numerals are the years 2023 and 2024, increasing to beyond 2100 as the rows rise 60 feet, and shift in color from reds to yellows to blues, evoking the passage of time. “The building’s glass roof is an integral part of the artwork, which is an abstract visualization of a ray of sunlight penetrating through,” Moureaux explains.
Timeline is the 47th iteration in Moureaux’s 100 Colors series, the first of which appeared in Tokyo more than a decade ago. (No. 48, composed of thousands of paper butterflies in 100 different shades for a Lancôme exhibition in Shanghai, featured in our pages last March.) “I will continue to exhibit 100 Colors all around the world,” Moureaux says. She’s currently planning no. 53 to appear this spring, back where it all began, in Tokyo.
Photography by Theo Baulig.
Photography by Raphael Metivet.