Tom Hallet
“À travers l’éclat, un paysage”
The stone, which detaches, which shreds, which detritus, was part of a world. Another world. Alive, she forms a herd, a solidified alliance. Turned into a landscape, it holds the undergrowth, the humidity, the warmth of the earth’s heart.
Once drawn onto its caverns, the noble pagan conquest. Conquest is never noble, conquest is always cavalcade. Yet, its initial taming brings forth the stone horse. The enrapturing croup of the animal settles down and lapidifies the traces of women and men who have disappeared.
In the heart, in the hollow of the palm, the pebble mountain is stone. The hand picks it, modulates it into caresses, domesticates it through sweet words. It begets. The little rock sweats itself into a crease; it is a throbbing muscle. She is a mountain pass and a crest and a waterfall too. She shivers, this earth, that used to be soft and became inflexible.
If it moves, it is danger, it is plates that collide and quakes. Here, the reduced print takes a living form, the multiple trace shaping the absences. It outlines a figure of the one who ploughed the earth, created the furrows and the roads. Together in the crevices, dew escapes from their purring nostrils.
As seeds they impregnates the sides. The jaws, that remained rocks, susurrate soft words onto their interlocking. Their eyes are summits. Below, the planes and then, behind, the woods and the city. Behind, the sky and its moon. Their shining manes stretch as far as the beams of light moves them; they are the day that dashes. From their steaming nostrils slips a sky sprinkled with floating vapours. With the surroundings lodged on its retinas, the mountain sometimes bucks and tumbles down. She, the queen of the in-between. The earth personified, and the sky at her feet.
The horse is a convoyer. It is responsible for the changing of conditions. The passage from one to the other, from one onto the other. Rearing, symbol of a displayed fertility. ‘Her’, the forgotten one. Folding and breathing, she repairs herself. Our eyes change focus, they look differently. Transformed into a mare, the mountain waters the earth. She flows lasciviously, unfolding the shame associated with her sex. She is pure force feeling herself.
