Impossible from the invitation photo to guess what the pink luminant round object is made from and how big it is. To learn more, I resort to the gallery which is in an apartment in an old residential building on Rue Chancelier de l´Hospital. At first, I miss the gallery entrance door and climb the stairs to the third floor.
Unexpectedly, this offers the premium view of one of the sculptures which is placed in a small interior patio. It is a small fragment of facade decoration crowned by a fuzzy tuft, mounted on a long pole. Later, I will get to know that its title is „Lightning rod“ and I understand that this is the typical approach by Benjamin Grivot to ironically turn the objects against themselves: the result of a lightning impact as a device to protect against exactly that. Will the lightning be deterred by the fact that it has already been there?
Inside the exhibition the hostess patiently explains the thinking behind the artworks. The round pink object turns out to be a resin cast of a tractor tire of considerable dimensions, illuminated by pink lighting on the inside. It is entitled “The origin of the world” as the famous Courbet painting. A rasterized painting of an anal plug is on the opposite wall of the pink object on a board exactly the same size as the inside of the tire cast (as underlined by the guide), and leaves open all kinds of associations.
Overall, resin casts from an agricultural environment are one of the dominant themes of this exhibition, highlighting the artist´s origin from and continuing attachment to the countryside. A corroded farmyard bucket is present as a resin replica, filled with water and decaying leaves. The resin casts present a sensualized exploration of the object surfaces (or the traces they left). Some of them are spread out on the floor and usually adorned by the trademark furry glass fibers.
Another striking example of the artist´s subversive reinterpretation strategy is a resin cast of a fire hazard warning sign (“Attention au feu”), while exactly the casting process can lead to overheating and ignition when too much polymerization starter is added, a risk this object gleefully plays with.
The exhibition was open from February 10 to April 6, 2024.