This work, commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, is astonishing in its brutality, humorously summed up in its pun-like title: La Défonce. A metal bar, like a stake, pierces the building housing the treasures of the Fond National d'Art Contemporain. It unsettles the viewer's gaze, seeming to sway the tall towers of La Défense. Yet from this work emerges an elegance, a purity, an energy.

It is made up of seven painted steel bars, each 25 m long, 70 m wide and 3.3 m high, forming a simple rectangular shape, inclined and half-buried in the ground.

François Morellet, a French artist born in Cholet in 1926, strives to remove all traces of subjectivity from his work. His abstract works seem to depend solely on combinatory "systems". Lines and curves multiply according to the artist's "mathematical decisions", or at random from lists of numbers such as the decimals of Pi or the digits in a telephone book. In this way, François Morellet aims to reduce the meaning of the work of art to a minimum, bordering on the absurd.