Benoit Platéus — Homecoming — Jeanrochdard Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 22 → June 30, 2014

Galerie Jeanrochdard welcomes Homecoming, an exhibition dedicated to Benoit Platéus that showcases a selection of works (photographs, sculptures and a video) spanning from 2008 to today.

Homecoming fosters dialogues and connections between works from different periods that address different topics, whilst exploring the gap between showing and reporting.

Underwater views, shadows, the intimacy of a bedroom, an ironing board… Found pictures are singled out, turned upside down, cut out, twisted. Benoit Platéus decontextualizes them by removing them from their original circumstances, and putting them through a process of copying and enlarging. He aims to undermine their potential, shred and fragment them, so he can look at them from a « very specific viewpoint ». By establishing a new deciphering method, he reveals the primal materiality of images with no captions or comments.

Elsewhere, Kodak flexicolor urethane sculptures made with jars of fixer and developer collected in a photo lab cover the floor.

“I really wanted to work on the idea of chemistry, the smells, the products used to develop and fix images. The sculpture itself is a jar. In theory, this jar contains all possible images.”

This overview mixing largely unknown images with highly emblematic pieces testifies to the artist’s fascination with observation as an experimental process that generates a constant oscillation between the observer, the environment and the proposals offered by the artist. The artwork « Un Plongeur» suggests different locations at the same time: we are standing before a picture, in the heart of the ocean, underwater, in a printed book, while simultaneously being faced with a pictorial space. Images thus contradict the widespread notion that photography can capture reality. In this sense, his art operates like a kind of « psychic camera » that plays with the onlooker’s perception and awareness.

Benoit Platéus (born in 1972), winner of the Young Belgian Art Prize in 2003, is one of the leading Belgian artists of his generation. His works encompasses photography, video, drawing and sculpture, and aims to reveal the ambiguity that lies right in the heart of the visible.