Is it an exhibition where we can read or an open library to the remedy for melancholy that the world of Benoît Piéron offers? It is “a tourist office for stationary travelers”the artist decides. The newly forty-year-old’s first major monographic exhibition, retracing the essential works of his artistic career to date, is joyfully experimental. In fact, it crosses three universes: that of the museum, that of the hospital, and that of a local library. And the graft takes.
The mix of genres and uses goes smoothly: in addition to the ticket office, which has become a simple reception desk for free admission for the occasion, the first room looks exactly like a reading room, with its bookshelves and the librarians’ desk. In detail, the artist colored the shelves with color gradients that are part of it “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 closely.
Inventing a hybridization
What is this library doing there? It’s all about contexts and beautiful escapes through daydreaming and imagination for this librarian’s son, who grew up in the hospital as a child afflicted with 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, and the director of the venue, to invent a hybridization, especially since the artist’s installations, always concerned with tired bodies and breaks, always include chairs, rest areas with books or children’s games available.
The glass hall opens onto the “Inner Street”, a huge central space of the premises, under a glass roof, which distributes the spaces of the art center. Book in hand or not, users and visitors are invited to continue their visit to this interior garden-like exterior. We encounter large piles of pastel sheets on the ground, discarded or waiting to be washed in this laundry room with dreamy wash cycles that act as an entrance to the exhibition. Their large eyes give them the appearance of domestic monsters or soft mountains. These hundreds of kilograms of sheets are the result of a local partnership with the University Hospital for the recovery of discarded hospital sheets, raw material for many of the artist’s works.
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