In the valley of the Lay, not very far from Sainte-Hermine, where the motorway bends embracing a hill and crossing a river, the place devoted to the erection of the "Portes pour la Vendée" has been chosen. Appointed with the project, Ivan Theimer has first of all penetrated the spirit of the place. He has measured the spot, has become imbued with the air and the light but also with the history of the county. He has put on the boots of the travellers of the past and followed the path traced by those of today. The motorway largely modifies the visual approach. The hill, the river, the bridge, a small castle there nested, drew a scenario that was to be read, where one needed to be placed. The artist has taken into consideration the very genius of the Vendée, the effluvia of the past coming up from its stones, its castles, its walls and its abbeys. It was unimaginable to build a contemporary artwork completely detached from the spatial and temporal reality of the place where it would be erected. The monument could not find its beauty but in the search of a perfect balance with the surrounding nature and couldn't draw its evocative strength but from the attentive listening of its past. The artist has striven to express the notion of passage: a physical passage from one county into another, a symbolic passage of the functional work, which is the motorway in the aesthetic and narrative field of the work of art. From one part to the other of the motorway layout, Theimer built two monumental doors, narrow in height ,reaching their maximum height next to the ways-out and softly declining while departing. Made up of two converging walls, but separated by a big fault, they bend at their corners creating a circle arch. The frame of the walls is made up of dry stones, sometimes cut by a line of flat stones, which strengthens the construction giving it a certain rhythm. These stones have been picked up in the fields, where they got their golden coat of passing time, which makes the stones, coupled at the edges sing. In the artist's mind, the wings of these monumental walls (eight metres high, fourteen metres long for one of the door and twenty-one for the other) which give away simultaneously an impression of reduction and destruction, must look like what would remain of ancient walls. But far from creating the image of fake ruins, he has, on the contrary, cut sharpen corners lines, given corner stones and cut edges. Along the motorway, the architectural frame imposes itself. Departing from it, it makes itself forgotten little by little and give away to nature. On these walls, Theimer has placed two wonderful bas-reliefs in white marble, several metres high, meant to be seen from far. In the Niort-Nantes direction, we can find some terrestrial animals, the horse and the deer; there to show we are heading to the earth. In the Nantes-Niort direction, we can find some sea animals, fishes, crustacea... there, to show we are heading to the sea. These bas-reliefs have a double function: aesthetic and narrative. In drawing them, Theimer was thinking of the sculptured doors of the ancient monuments, but also of the buildings dating back to the Roman times, where a whole universe of sculpture made the light vibrate and the facades live. This monument holds in the artist's mind, also the function of Roman milestones, where any kind of signs and shapes were engraved, being for the traveller ,at the same time, both a landmark and a reminder of those very events linked to the crossed territories. And in the hollow of the four circle arcs the artist placed four pyramidal columns, each of them born by the headed bulk of a gigantic turtle. The upward convergence of its arrows and its walls makes an all-absorbing effect. These monumental works of art were moulded in Pietrasanta, near Lucca, in Tuscany, where the artist loves working. Theimer excels in the exacting technique of bronze working. There his iconographical search has been much elaborated and different subjects cut the movement of these arrows stretched out towards the sky like as many narrative pages. Horses and deer inhabit maps so reminding us we are in a passing place. As in most of Theimer's works, the columns are worked to their very end, even where the eye cannot reach. After the fashion of the cathedral builders, whom sculptured and chiselled the stone in corners visible to them only, he vivifies his bronze arrows with a continuous quiver so endowing his works with a hidden vitality. All Theimer's iconographic program draws inspiration from ancient cosmology. We may comment long on the symbolism of the number four, which symbolises the solid, the tangible and evokes the idea of fullness and universality, as well as on the symbol of the turtle. This animal with its shell as round as the sky is but also as flat as the ground in its lower part, is, in itself, a representation of the universe. Powerful and charitable, it is a cosmos carrier, it carries the world. As far as the obelisks are concerned, they evoke the greatness of a past civilisation. Each of his references is less a loan than a quotation. By the use of ancient imagines he creates a whole semiology of which the contemporary spectator not always has the key, but which anyway evokes in him some far away echoes. What comes from the very past, surrounds what our age produces and the ages seem to be abolished. However this work won't find its own logic and its fulfilment but in the patient work of time and in that one, unrelenting, of nature. These two fragments of architecture are conceived to resign themselves to the abundance of the leaves, in this case a particular type of green oak characteristic to this county, which never loses its foliage, not even at the height of winter. Through the windows, made on the sides of the walls, one day some branches will escape. And nature, making her rights over architecture respected, will cause the drawing to change by the creation of a sort of vegetable sculpture. Winds will bring some ground which will settle among the stones and with the passing of time, mosses and lichens will create, on the mineral walls, at the centre of the bas-reliefs, which recall to mind terrestrial and sea creatures, other patterns created by chance and by nature's work and will make a work of timeless beauty. Yvan Theimer, in charge for realizing the whole work, has immediately tried to understand the spirit of this place.