Homecoming

Galerie Jeanrochdard welcomes until June 30, 2014 « 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.