Did Wuidar's work benefit from a worker's error?
Photo ©Jean-Michel Bourdoux
The Labyrinth installed in 1987 near the entrance to the Faculty of Psychology, Logopedics and Educational Sciences building contains a whole series of allusions to the reflections and research carried out there.
Photo ©Francine Brouillet
First of all, the form is highly symbolic. Wuidar likes the idea that a labyrinth can represent a sacred journey, a path full of false roads and dead ends, to reach what we hope to find...
" (...) the labyrinth is never a purely formal exercise. Its complexity responds to an intention, often concealed, of revelation, or even secret initiation. Its necessarily slow resolution is synonymous with access to unsuspected knowledge. (...) There's no way of burning through the labyrinth and risking losing yourself and everything else! Such is also the art of Léon Wuidar.
Although inspired by the labyrinth in Amiens Cathedral, Wuidar's labyrinth has two entrances, but never leads to its center. Should we see it as an invitation to "jump the wall, to risk transgression", as poet Francis Édeline suggests? Something to ponder...
Photo Claude Sottiaux
The center in question houses a black cube that echoes the Ka'aba in Mecca or the black monoliths in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. This cube is marked, on the side visible from the building, with the Ψ of Ψυχή (breath, anima, soul). Another nod to psychology and the sacred...
As for the Latin phrase "Errare humanum est" [to err is human] carved into the last riser of the staircase leading to the work, it's obviously a new subject for psychologists to ponder. But in reality, it reveals a miscalculation on the part of the masons. In fact, when the workers built the staircase, they unwittingly left a 5 cm difference between the last step and the work. Léon Wuidar filled the gap with a marble slab engraved with the inscription, allowing a final wink... In the end, the error was rather welcome.
Léon Wuidar, Labyrinthe, Marble and granite, h.80, L. 80, l. 80 cm (cube), diameter: 700 cm (terrace), 1987
