Cumulocumulonimbus capillatus incus functions on the mode of a mise en abîme: it is a cube composed with 8000 dice. The work plays with chance, each installation produces a renewed visual combination. Robert Filliou said that Eins. Un. One... (16000 dice spread on the floor, 1984) “can materialise, materialises and will materialise with no limit to the most diverse forms or combination of forms.”
Richers' sculpture acts like an encoded and pixellated image of an individual according to different layers of meaning: the weight of the work is equivalent to that of an average man (76kg); the colours of the dice recall those used in diagrams representing a codified human DNA; every choice that mankind has to make could be imagined as a roll of dice. The title of this sculpture refers to a cloud that provokes very destructive hail and thunderstorms. The sculpture is as fragile and threatening as this meteorological phenomenon – dislocation and explosion loom. In his work, the artist creates assocations between dice, hailstones, meteorites. Different levels of meaning (mankind, the cliCmate, games) are crystallised in this artwork according to concatenation logic that creates a whole. The artist links the individual and the atmosphere, microcosm and macrocosm, in a manner close in spirit to the sociologist Edgar Morin's concept of complexity (etymologically meaning “what is woven together”), as a web of interlacing.