Benoit Lemercier — Fragments de Métaréalité — Dutko / Quai Voltaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 23 → June 22, 2024

Galerie Dutko is pleased to present, from May 23rd to June 23rd, 2024, “Fragments de Metaréalité”, a solo exhibition by French artist Benoit Lemercier. Ten years after his last presentation at the gallery, this exhibition is an opportunity to discover his recent works and his new series: “Hénosis”.
The aim of Benoit Lemercier’s work is to question the invisible in order to enchant the visible. “Enchanting our daily lives is my duty”, says the artist.

BEYOND THE VISIBLE
Benoit Lemercier offers an artistic vision of the mysteries of the world around us. Drawing on various scientific theories, he invites us on a journey to the heart of this unknown. The exhibition at the Dutko Gallery, entitled “Fragments de Métaréalité”, features wall sculptures and monumental pieces from the “Supercordes” series, as well as paintings and drawings from the “Hénosis” series.

METAREALITY
“Reality is not the real”. For Benoit Lemercier, reality is the Whole that makes up the universe. This universe is far wider and more complex than we can conceive and perceive. Our five sensory receptors — sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch — do not allow us to apprehend the whole of reality. “From the moment we are born, thanks to our cognitive functions, we begin, very gradually, to construct our own world and form our own comfortable, intimate sensory bubble. This bubble, with its elastic and shifting contours, is at once our field of freedom and our prison, at once the Matrix and Plato’s Cave. This bubble… it’s our reality, but it’s not reality.”

Benoit Lemercier calls Metareality the part of reality we don’t perceive, the world made up of information, waves and energies that participate in the “creation” of our reality. Metareality is that which goes beyond and encompasses our reality to form the real.
The artist strives to give poetic form to this Metareality that we cannot apprehend. He shows tangibly the invisible links that connect us to this often counter-intuitive environment. “The invisible has the face of truth”, he says.

SUPERCORDES
To structure his work, Benoit Lemercier organizes his production into series. Each one represents a fragment of this Metareality:
The Hypercubes series offers a representation of the fourth spatial dimension in a set of geometric, angular, black sculptures that open up perspectives and vanishing lines towards infinity. In the artist’s iconography, they symbolize the infinitely large.
The Supercords series, based on the quantum theory of the same name, gives shape, through an interlacing of white ribbons, to the infinitesimal undulations of the smallest constituent of matter. This quantum theory puts forward the idea that tiny vibrating strings give rise to subatomic particles.
Here, it evokes the world of the infinitely small.
The Matière Noire series models a solid vision of cosmic energy, hidden and undetectable.
The colorful canvases in the Lumières series present a dreamlike interpretation of the path taken by light waves and particles.

HENOSIS
The Henosis series seeks to represent what scientists call the melting point of theories, that unlikely moment when quantum theory meets relativistic theory, when the infinitely small meets the infinitely large. “Henosis” is an ancient Greek word that translates as “union” or “unity”.
Benoit Lemercier imagines the result of unifying these two apparently opposed fields of reality. Here he touches on one of science’s greatest mysteries. To represent this cosmic duality at a single point of intersection, he combines his Hypercubes series, a symbol of the infinitely large, made up of angular shapes in black, with his Supercords series, an image of the infinitely small, with curved shapes in white. By fusing these two archetypes of inverted polarities, he creates his own Taijitu, in search of harmony and perfect balance.