After Last Splash, an installation created for the île aux fagots, the artist Boris Chouvellon has returned with a work entitled Miroir aux alouettes [Decoys]. Initially designed for the town of King’s Lynn, this piece in mirror finish stainless steel has finally found its place right in the heart of the Hortillonnages Gardens, due to difficulties in installing it in the deep, muddy site which was orginally chosen. Like a strange craft, these strictly aligned gleaming sheets materialise here while deconstructing a fragment of the aquatic space. Twenty five square metres of water and a formal water feature accentuated by gleaming black buoys:  suspended by a system of chains and tubes, these floating balls, both opaque and dazzling, create an effect of perspective in a unique ode to shipwrecks, hijacking materials normally associated with luxury yachting. Like a ship under construction, the whole is evocative at one and the same time of the practices of shipbuilding and its effects on the landscape: for the approaching visitor, it transforms itself into a distorted, unrecognisable and anamorphic object

Born in 1980, Boris Chouvellon studied at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, and at the Villa Arson in Nice. From the outside to the inside of the studio, back and forth. It’s by pacing across the landscape that Boris Chouvellon’s practice makes sense. Laying down  markers on the periphery of the city, in boundary areas, he draws a line of pieces based on the  movement of entropy, that which shakes up the world and all its materials, finally offering up a mirror where vanity becomes poetry. In 2012, the Musée d’Art Art in Marseille offered him his first personal exhibition, Running on Empty, which presented a collection of monumental structures in rough concrete, photographs and videos.