Magician & Stripes

Benoît Platéus uses photography, video, drawing, and sculpture to transform daily images and spaces, wandering through the interstices between city buildings to the meanders of the psyche, whispering the poetry of things accidental, imperfection, traces. Distortion, saturation, glare, enlargement, deletion, reversal … when set at a distance, the image flips onto its other side, opening up to all forms of interpretation.

This is particularly true of his Pages, through which, with the help of small misalignments, he reveals the unexpressed pictorial possibilities in the pages of books. Enlargement and cropping “by addition”, for example, opens up the possibility for different spaces to exist alongside one another, inside and on the outside of the book. This also applies to the Ghostburn series in which he reshoots archive images using an extreme exposure technique, transforming subjects that are splashed with light so that they become ghosts, as is suggested by the title of the work.

Each viewer will see what they want to see. “What interests me are the transitory states which make everything possible. I really like the fact that things can escape categorisation; that gives them more presence, more strength; it shows their singularity.”
From a technical point of view, the backgrounds are of paramount importance. Thanks to the intense processing, superimposed shapes can appear anchored while floating, in a sort of controlled drift. The control appears subordinate to freedom, with lucky accidents progressively defining the progress of the work. Benoît Platéus willingly takes on any new direction offered to him.