Two events gave me the impulse to start constructing optical toys.

It started with the viewing of a short animation film more than 15 years ago. 

It featured a drawing from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec showing two women stretched out on a bed.

Suddenly they started moving as if by magic, living a moment of their everyday life and finally falling into their initial position again, that of the original drawing.

Secondly, while in San Francisco in the spring of 1997, I visited the Camera Obscura & Holograph Gallery and the Penny Arcade – Musée Mécanique full of wonderful mechanical devices.

time – perpetual motion – repetition of a gesture – surprise – immediacy – reflections

Optical toys create a duality between drawing and movement, reveal a possible life, short as it may be.

It is a present, a tangible and rare moment allowing a glimpse into another dimension.

These primitive cinematic objects, through a certain mechanical velocity, trigger a dynamic impulse to a two-dimensional subject congealed on a piece of paper.

A drawing or a clumsy draft comes alive, gradually, rhythmically tries to free itself from its static state and suddenly gets wild and crazy.

This brief movement repeats itself indefinitely, absurdly and becomes a sentence, a story told in a blink of an eye, with a magical quality.

The objects themselves - their primitive mechanical beauty, their industrial quality and their simple functionality - are important to me.

My optical toys are built from recycled material – mostly metal, plastic and wood components - and are set in motion manually.

When turned, they generate vibrations and chaotic sounds that could be heard in fairs or when one places a cardboard piece with a clothes peg on spikes of a bicycle wheel.

MB 2010

///Optical toys / praxinoscopes, zootrope & thaumatrope made of recycled material and drawings / from 2006 to 2016