Artist: Benoît Platéus
Exhibition title: maps, cutouts and others sunburns
Venue: Berthold Pott, Cologne, Germany
Date: March 9 – April 17, 2024
Photography: ©AR / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Berthold Pott, Cologne
The gallery is delighted to welcome Benoît to the program of the gallery! It is a great honor to present his first solo exhibition maps, cutouts, and others sunburns in Cologne, showing new paintings in small, medium and large scale.
The central components of Benoit’s works are coincidence and imperfection. His painting, which at times appears fragile, minimal and at the same time in love with detail, reflects and provokes the unforeseeable, even if the starting point of his paintings can often be existing image sources of a very different nature. These visual inspirations include for example book or picture excerpts, historical paintings, prints, tattoos or natural phenomena.
It is important to him that his composition does not appear to follow an obvious pattern. He is always looking for the reverse, the reversed, the contradictory, the hidden, the echo. Flowers appear like skeletons, brush marks like shadowy little shadow patterns; he mostly only hints, his paintings rarely become too concrete. It is believed that punched tape patterns, brain twists, X-ray images, textile fabrics, traces of rust or shapes of cave paintings are transformed in abstract landscapes and create interwoven worlds of imagination.
Benoit usually starts working with his canvases creating different layers of paint, which are often erased and washed out again, so that the backgrounds of the work appear kind of faded. Patterns, grids or organic formations complement each other like a collage: small paper elements torn out by hand are painted and glued into the canvas compositions. They appear like foreign bodies or science fiction images, sometimes similar to meteorites, sometimes like flower heads or leaves, always walking between worlds.
Benoit Platéus was born in 1972 in Belgium. Having witnessed the digital revolution and the dematerialization of images, he seeks to overcome their visible nature, to free them from their fixity. He uses photography, video, drawing and sculpture to transform everyday images and spaces that he distorts, saturates, enlarges, erases or reverses. A tireless observer, Benoit Platéus introduces a distance between objects and their perception to make them fall on the other side, in a space of variable dimensions and multiple interpretations. His works reveal the poetic force of the interstitial and of the trace (text taken from the webpage of Meessen de Clercq gallery, Brussels).
Winner of the Jeune Peinture Belge award in 2003, a retrospective exhibition was devoted to Benoit Platéus’s work in 2019 at Museum Wiels, Brussels (Belgium) and at the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (Germany). His work has been shown at Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark), Sauvage, Düsseldorf (Germany), Bozar, Brussels, IKOB Eupen and Albert Baronian (Belgium), in the US at Karma, New York, signs and symbols, New York, Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles and HighLight Gallery, San Francisco, in France at Palais de Tokyo, Maison Rouge, Fondation Hippocrène and Centre National de la Photographie, Paris (France), at SIC, Helsinki (Finland), Aline Vidal Gallery, Paris, France and at Mamoc, Beijing (China).
