L’Escalina – Arnaut, Dante, Queneau

This staircase-shaped sculpture is organised by the first Queneau numbers. Its title links Arnaut Daniel, Dante and Raymond Queneau. The catalogue follows that connection through the sestina: six end-words change position according to a fixed permutation across six stanzas. Arnaut’s poetic invention and Dante’s encounter with him in Purgatorio provide a literary background to Queneau’s later exploration of formal constraints. The staircase turns that connection into a physical object. The catalogue interprets climbing as an image of the effort involved in accepting a rule and working within it: the constraint provides the structure from which the artwork develops.

The sestina is a particularly concrete meeting point between language and mathematics. Its six recurring end-words remain the same, but the permutation changes their position from stanza to stanza. The procedure preserves the elements while reorganising their relations. In Queneau’s later literary experiments, the comparable question is what a chosen formal scheme allows a writer to construct.

CREW gives that idea an ascending, stepped shape. Its coloured elements build a progression that can be followed across the sculpture, translating the catalogue’s theme of constraint into a form with height, depth and direction. The reference to Dante’s encounter with Arnaut in Purgatorio places the staircase within a longer literary history. Mathematical organisation, poetic craft and the physical effort of ascent converge in one object.