A man with a vision of reality.

"Man's imagination thrives on contact with Nature. A visionary of reality, he undertakes his own discovery.

Our imaginative power lies in our incessant efforts to understand our relationship with Nature, our place in it, the significance of our arrival among the crowd of beings. - Where else would this imagination find material to
exercise than in the infinitely varied forms of the Skeleton, from which it evokes life?

The skeleton is the material proof of the continuity of forms, of earthly logic. No surprises: everything is prepared. The whole is brought
to a supreme harmony, such that nothing can be changed. An absolute synthesis of the earth in a single creature is visible in every skeleton, a complete expression of true beauty.

Each limb has the character of the whole, gathered or elongated according to the animal. All these immobile forms reveal the suppleness of the movement that was. - Each bone takes on the shape of the bone that precedes it and transmits it to the one that follows. Like a conduit of life, a unique groove perpetuates itself and marks each part with its trace.

The mind that pursues this all-material logic is struck by the expression of vitality that emerges, and soon the skeleton gives the illusion of vanished life and movement."

Eugène Carrière, painter, L'Homme visionnaire de la réalité
(skeletons and fossils at the Natural History Museum), 1903

Musings of an Artist.

From the Seed to the Vow Bone,
from long to short time,
at least the last two hundred million years...
From the appearance of the Sea Coco to that of flowering plants...
From Bipedal Dinosaurs (Theropods) to the origin of Birds...
From the welding of clavicles (in Theropods) to the "Furcula" (wishbone) of birds...
As with "Toumaï", the oldest among us,
(7 million years), these two welded clavicles, nose to nose, have a perfume of eternity.
Covered in gold, this double wishbone sends us all
back to the artist's "suns of the heart".

Professor Michel Brunet, paleontologist and scientific father of "Toumaï", discovered in 2002. Collège de France, Paris, for Viébel. ©

L'ARC DE VIE.

By giving human form to chicken bones, Viébel inscribes
Man in an animality at the heart of the great cycle of life:
that which loves, suffers, reproduces and dies.
But giving human form to bones also means resurrecting the dead.
The dead are everywhere.
They populate our memories.
From the tiers of the great circus, silent, they watch us, observe us, watch our gestures, our words.
They keep watch.
Viébel gives flesh back to bones, and thus gives life back to the dead.
And she covers their remains with a bronze mantle that time does not destroy, that hardship patinates. Born of a battle with fire,
bronze invites wisdom and respect. Its presence...to silence.
In this face-to-face, body-to-body, front-to-front confrontation, they are equal, those who look at and fight each other. And the duel becomes a duo, one against the other, self against self.
And the "Olympic I" is transformed into a "We",
fraternal and supportive.
And the wishes of childhood are perhaps fulfilled.

Patrice Gree, bookseller, writer, for Viébel.

The furcula hyphen...

From sweaty flesh to bone marrow, Olympic breath trembles in the air towards an endless glow. Viébel takes the torments of effort out of the fire for a dance filled with dreams and
solar imprints.

Under this Arc de vie, and in this Parisian sky, the athlete is the color of bark and his shadow illuminates the fraternity that sleeps under invisible flames. Like a snowflake, full of Etruscan audacity, Viébel caresses the furtive happiness of an intoxicating finale.

A ray colors the muscles in motion, the eyes revive the memory of records, and the enigma of wonder whispers a momentum without return. A work that embodies the roots of Life, drops of water from a spring so far away where the golden seed smiles above the podium.

Morad El Hattab, essayist, for Viébel.

"Get up and walk!"

Viébel's Vœux bone echoes the ancient imperative: "Get up and walk!" in stunned silence
. The bronze with which she
coats it sculpts it as if to return it to the mineral, to the elemental,
to this equally silent, equally sonorous metaphysical surfeit.

As it straddles space, the bone translates the arc of the moment when the
first hominid erected his bust vertically.
Compare it to Alberto Giacometti's Walking Man,
, and you'll be amazed by its prodigious uprooting from the earth and
from the elements. He evades them by drawing his votive line. It's made
of enigma and beauty. Thus was born the fork in the road of
semantics and anthropology.

Minimal staging presides over it: it wrings tears from our eyes
. A staging enhanced by its material coefficient
of bronze. The bone vibrates. It flexes its muscles like an ascetic ocean-going athlete
. The Etruscans may have invented it, but the
Etruscans were Africans, as were the ancient Greeks,
as Homer and Herodotus teach us. Their civilization,
their science, their philosophy come from the fundamental continent
where, at the dawn of humanity, our ancestors chose to stand
and walk.

Nimrod Bena, Poet, for Viébel.