Each year, Friends of La Maison Rouge invites an artist to produce a work for the patio. The young German artist Luka Fineisen has been chosen for summer 2012. The inside space is delimited by darkish windows and a high brick wall, making a striking contrast with the part that is open to the sky. Luka Fineisen felt this contrast called for a material with the same opposing qualities. Her installation, which she has called perfect fluid, includes the café tables and chairs which take up almost half the patio. A specially designed tank, placed on top of the wall furthest from the tables, pours frothy foam onto a plane of glass, set slightly at an angle. Foam is produced continually during la maison rouge’s opening hours. The slope of the glass surface introduces a strict formal purity to the organic matter and creates a more intense luminosity across the patio. The spectator walks around this snow-white substance whose transparency against the darker background allows occasional glimpses of black or grey. The foam spills across the width of the surface to gradually fill the entire space. This ephemeral sculpture is in a constant state of change, growing at the same time as it disappears. A current of air might snatch a piece of foam and carry it to one of the tables. These fragments of foam suggest the fluffiness of whipped cream far more than the compact, ominous mass of a glacier or avalanche. From outside the patio, this semi-transparent installation presents itself as a moving tableau, while variations in sunlight produce flickering shadows in the monochrome structure.