The magical swing
A wooden column rises from a single foot and divides into a fork, two arms that open like the pans of a scale. The wood is knotted and honey-toned, varnished to a sheen that follows the twist of the grain and the swellings of the burl. On the left arm rests a heavy grey stone, angular, with cutting edges, a slate-like mass balanced in the hollow of the branch. The right arm carries a paler mineral, greenish and translucent, its surface raw and crystalline. Between them, the verticality of the trunk holds the weighing.
The title announces a swing, and the form answers it. Two unequal weights face each other across the fork, one dense and dull, the other milky and catching the light, in a stillness that seems forever on the verge of tipping. A thin outgrowth escapes toward the right, a tapered branch ending in points, like a limb feeling for its hold. A small metal bolt sits flush against the shaft, a quiet trace of the assembly. The animal reading stays available without ever settling.
The balance looks precarious and deliberate at once. Where other vertical works in the corpus weigh downward, this one plays at suspension, weight that hesitates, a stone that might fall. Robert Bibeau works the found wood here for what it already offers, a fork ready to receive, and into it he sets two mineral fragments that differ in density and colour. Gravity becomes the subject.
The piece can be read as a sign of widening. The fantastic bestiary enters a corpus dominated by the emerging human figure and memento mori: an animal in mid-leap, a colour that gleams, a material that catches the light. It is the neighbourhood of Shary Boyle's grotesque-yet-playful, or of Howie Tsui's contemporary animism. Robert Bibeau proves here that he can hold the grave and the animated in the same hand.