Meditate with Benoît Dutour (born in 1967)

Blessed are those who cry. The astonishing beatitude in the Gospel of Saint Matthew (5, 4) has at least the merit of emphasizing that the experience of tears is indeed the foundation of our humanity. This is also what the artist Benoît Dutour underlines in a more poetic way in an elegant installation composed of thirty-one tears in sculpted optical glass. Each of them stands out for its content: small objects from nature or the industrious life of humans are delicately embedded there, like ancient fossils in amber.

This work is also the fruit of a participatory work, based on prior exchanges in 2024 with residents, craftsmen, entrepreneurs from Riom (Puy-de-Dôme) and the Auvergne region to choose symbols recalling the specificities of this territory. We can contemplate, for example, these small brass cogs which suggest the fine mechanisms of clocks or other precision mechanical devices.

The artist also evokes the more interior workings whose ordering is even more mysterious. This is where the fusion with tears is particularly significant. Whether they are sadness or happiness, these testify to a subtle balance that our hearts constantly try to find, as events progress, by pouring out the overflow of emotions.

Neurobiologists, fine watchmakers of modern times, have shown that crying, resulting from an adrenaline rush linked to stress or too much joy, activates part of the nervous system, slowing down the heart rate and relaxing the entire body. Thus fear and gratitude are reconciled within us. Affliction and wonder.