Violence and Sweetness

“Caution: Extremely fragile. Please do not touch.” This printed warning is the only explicit barrier guarding Aude Moreau’s Tapis de sucre 31 1  - Darling Foundry, Tapis de sucre 3 (20 March to 1 June 2008).. The concept of the work, which the artist has already applied to more intimate spaces,2 2  - Tapis de sucre 1, Triangle Artists’ Workshop, Dumbo, New York, Brooklyn, 2002 and Tapis de sucre 2, Orange 2006, Saint-Hyacinthe contemporary art event. is in this case extended to the great hall of the Darling Foundry. At first sight, the contrast could not be more pronounced between the imposing rawness of an architectural container designed for heavy industry and the subtle delicacy of a contemporary artistic content, which insinuates itself into the empty shell of an outmoded model of economic exploitation. However, is this opposition so certain? Here sugar is dumped in industrial quantities (two and a half tons, to be precise), in a shocking sample of its over-consumption in a society that is accustomed to a sweetness enabling it to maintain harshness at bay, beginning with the conditions of its production. It is in the sugar industry that working conditions closest to slavery have been perpetuated, confining a distant agricultural proletariat to an existence more precarious than that of an artwork made of sugar: such is the price of the snug security of Western comfort. In a manner similar to the Sugar Children series by Brazilian artist Vic Muniz, Aude Moreau’s Tapis de sucre ties the bitter rigidity of the iron law of wages to the sweetness of life in the consumer society it underpins. 

The Tapis de sucre also questions the place of a refined culture—as of refined sugar—within this raw economic logic. The carpet seems ­precious because its stencilled fringes reproduce a decorative lace motif, applied repetitively with great care to convey the impression of handmade work. This craftsman-like work, which imitates the industrial process, invites comparison with the thankless labour that preceded it elsewhere to produce its raw material, evoked in the sugar plantation scenes painted in dark filigree on the exhibit walls. The artwork commands respect by simultaneously underscoring the dignity and indignity of work, drawing on the ambiguous connections between artistic creation and industrial production.