Benoît Piéron

Benoît Piéron (b. Ivry-sur-Seine, 1983) creates moments, installations and objects. He is interested in the sensuality of plants, the borders of the body and the temporality of waiting rooms. He practices patchwork, existential gardening and designs wallpapers. Having always lived with a pet illness, the hospital world is his ecosystem. From time to time, he gives workshops around botany and ableism. In fall 2021, he held gardening workshops at Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, within the programming of the exhibition Dead Souls Whisper (1986-1993), devoted to British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman. For the past few months, he has been questioning the sustenance of unicorns, the place of orgasm in the hospital and lethal flora. He is nominated for the 2022 Prix Fondation Pernod Ricard and has upcoming exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; L'antre peaux, Bourges; the Sultana Gallery, Paris and Arles; and the Matadero Madrid. As of September 2022, he will begin a year-long residency in Lens, France as part of the Pinault Collection’s residency programme. Benoît Piéron lives and works in Paris.

Cottagecore,

Galerie Sultana, Paris

Feb-Mar 2022

Illness Shower,

Sultana Summer Set - Arles,

July 2022

Benoît Piéron has described his work as a “sacrificial practice of time” forged by a lifelong experience with and alongside illness, and a childhood largely spent in hospital. Piéron’s practice is thus informed by the experience of waiting and meditations on the liminal boundaries between health and sickness, presence and absence, inside and outside, the body and the architectural, temporal, and medical structures that shape it. Illness Shower continues the artist’s exploration of these themes across a distinct formal vocabulary of hand- sewn textiles, lanyard, repurposed medical apparati, bats, plants, and soap.

The exhibition takes Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) as its starting point, which critically examined the ways that deleterious metaphors used to describe illness led to a misunderstanding of disease and its treatment, and simultaneously placed the blame of illness on its victims. While Sontag argued for the eradication of metaphor when discussing illness, Piéron offers a countervailing, poetic approach that is grounded in a celebratory, holistic acceptance of illness and uncertainty as vital aspects of our shared humanity.

Playing on the tradition of bridal and baby showers, which mark an impending existential transformation, the exhibition proposes a framework for engaging with the phenomenon of illness in ways that also speak to the positive elements that arise from it: the lived experience of alternative temporalities, the emergent forms of radical care and intimacy, and the expansive understanding of identity as something non-essentialist and ever in flux.