If you are wondering what a “safe place” might look like, you can open the door to the Sultana gallery (Paris 3e). At Benoît Piéron, an artist born in 1983 whose life is intimately linked to the hospital world, this vision of a place ” on “Who “respects all types of life”takes on the air of a waiting room with a diffuse softness and crossed by paradoxical presences.
In the “Rice Powder” exhibition, rows of seats allow you to sit, plants grow, and fabrics in pastel colors, pink, blue, green and yellow, from which he makes patchworks, stuffed animals, and padded armchairs, are used and recycled hospital sheets, which can be purchased in the form of rags by the kilo in a large DIY store. According to “a whole heraldry of bedridden people”, these colors provide information on the departments from which the sheets come, and the names of hospital structures appear in the weaving. On the ground, a pile of pieces of sheets creates a shapeless monster with an intense gaze.
Not far away, at Lafayette Anticipations, the artist is presenting, within the exhibition “Waiting for tomorrow”, a new installation which seems to respond to him, since it is a particularly absorbent laundromat, where the windows of the machines to wash offer dreamlike horizons that transcend waiting and boredom.
The artist arrives in “work rose”a full suit found in a professional clothing section, matching cap and sneakers. “I have been confronted with existential intensities since my birth, so I don’t completely feel like an artist, but rather have a practice of the depth of time”he replies when asked how art came into his life.
Tame the disease
Catching meningitis at birth, becoming hemiplegic, developing leukemia at 3 and a half years old at the time of the contaminated blood affair, being transfused, like all the children in his Kremlin-Bicêtre department, but surviving without becoming HIV positive. And diving back into the hospital world, five years ago, with a new kidney cancer, which led to a neuromuscular disease… Does he feel like a miracle? He feels more like Monik, his bat made of reformed sheets, present in all his installations: “a bit “undead””, not dead. The artist is not, moreover, “not in a life-death binary”and tends to do things that are a “use of time” : patchwork, scoubidous, threading beads… These activities that we give to sick children to keep them busy, he reappropriated them to create comforting pieces. Tame the illness, live with it « compagnie »is a theme that runs through all his work, free of pathos.
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