Is it an exhibition where you can read or a library open to the remedy for melancholy that the world of Benoît Piéron offers? Is “a tourist office for stationary travelers”the artist decides. The first major monographic exhibition of this forty-year-old, which covers the fundamental works of his artistic career to date, is joyfully experimental. In fact, it crosses three worlds: that of the museum, that of the hospital and that of a local library. And the graft takes.
The mix of genres and uses occurs without problems: beyond the box office, converted for the occasion into a simple reception desk for free tickets, the first room looks exactly like a reading room, with its bookshelves and the librarians’ office. . In detail, the artist colored the shelves with color gradients that are part of his “heraldry” : the pastel tones of hospital sheets, pink, yellow, green, blue. And one wall is covered in wallpaper with geometric patterns that are more figurative than they seem if you look closer.
Invent a hybridization
What is this library doing there? These are contexts and beautiful escapes through daydreaming and imagination for this son of a librarian, who grew up in the hospital as a child affected by various illnesses. During the preparation of the exhibition, two local libraries near the Store temporarily closed. The idea matured between the artist and the curator of the exhibition, Céline Kopp, also the director of the venue, to invent a hybridization, all the more so since the artist’s installations, always concerned with tired bodies and pauses, always include seats, areas rest with books or games for children available.
The glass room opens to the “Inner Street”, an immense central space of the premises, under a glass cover, which distributes the spaces of the art center. With reservation in hand or not, users and visitors are invited to continue the visit towards this exterior that resembles an interior garden. We find large piles of pastel-colored sheets on the floor, discarded or waiting to be washed in this laundry, with dreamy washing cycles, which acts as the entrance to the exhibition. Their large eyes give them the appearance of domestic monsters or soft mountains. These hundreds of kilos of sheets are the result of a local collaboration with the University Hospital to recover discarded hospital sheets, the raw material for many of the artist’s works.
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