«Rounding the corners» is a series of two collages paintings made with acrylic and washi scotchs where
are represented houses in the shape of a carrond. The carrond is the artist’s favorite form, a fusion of a
square and a round. One of the houses is blue, on stilts and closed. The other is pink, laid on the ground
and open. Their roof is rounded. Without any human or plant elements to indicate the scale, the size of
the houses remains unknown. Similarly, no clue is left on the materials used for their construction. 

The series is inspired by Le Corbusier’s housing units and domed architectures. The domes date back
to prehistoric times and are universal. Since then, they have been built with mud, snow, stone, wood,
brick, concrete, metal, glass and plastic. They can rest on a rotunda or drum and be supported by
columns or pillars. Very popular in the late 60s and early 70s, domes embody for hippies an architecture
that fuses a sense of self with a sense of the cosmos. For them, where corners and square buildings
restrict the mind, domes enlarge them. They thus become the privileged gathering places in alternative
communities where they are intended to promote a new way of living non-hierarchical.
The French title of the series refers to the French expression « arrondir les angles» which could be
translated by “Smooth things over”, which means that one tries to temper a violent opposition between
two people.

With this series, the artist evokes two phenomena. The first is social.
The blue house reflects the desire of closing the borders, of a part of the population of northern countries
whose color emphasizes the coldness. The stilts illustrate this desire to make itself inaccessible,
accentuated by the lack of scale condemning any access to it. The ocean that the house overlooks is
empty, no human presence is visible and no lifebuoy floats on the surface of the water. What happens
inside the house remains a mystery, the door being closed and opaque. No clue is given as to lifestyles
and no one knows how many people are inside the house. The artist makes a clear reference to
Schrödinger’s cat experience, wondering if they are dead or alive or both. This last state is for her the
very definition of a life without social interaction.

The pink house, whose doors are open, symbolizes the countries of the South and their heat linked in
particular to global warming, which will surely lead to future migrations. The pink house is also empty of
any human presence. The pink is here used by the artist first of all to reflect the human warmth of these
inhabitants who despite the potential poverty of a part of them, reflected by the total absence of goods,
objects or furniture inside the house, leaves their door open. In addition, the artist also uses this color
to recall that the earth was one of the first building materials, especially in Mesopotamia. It is still used
today being particularly loved by the great African architect Francis Keré.

The second phenomenon described in the series concerns the environmental impact of the current
architecture. The tension brought by modern civilization on natural ecosystems is often brutal leading to
a significant decrease in biodiversity, which shines of its absence around the two constructions.

Maud Louvrier Clerc hears with «Rounding the corners» distilled the idea of a reintroduction of the dome
in architecture in the double hope of accentuating the feeling of being connected and integrated into a
single ecosystem, the Earth.