2 Pack Age (too package / to package), the third personal exhibition of Benjamin Sabatier at the gallery, will allow us to discover the new creations of this young French artist whose approach is based on the analysis of our consumer society, its economic modus operandi and its influence on current artistic creation.
We already know his Peintures en kit (Paintings in kit form), works undertaken with push pins and sold in the form of kits / cardboard boxes, or his Bacs (Trays), which were very successful at the FIAC 2006. Always very visual, his works fascinate a wide audience
After becoming interested in production and distribution cycles, today Benjamin Sabatier is casting his critical eye over packaging which has taken on prime importance. Today everything must be time-stamped and well-ordered: chance and the random no longer have any place in our globalised world.
The pack age / Conditioning / Too much packaging: in the sense that the « envelope » of the good (packaging) conceals from us the usage value (and hence the labour value), only letting its trading value transpire. From then on the object is reduced to the hearer-status of an idea of itself. It is such an idea, and not the thing itself, which supplies the pretext to trade exchange. At the end of the day what you buy, that which creates our desire, is not the object, but its envelope, which, moreover, is the first thing we throw away.
The current economic issues (problems linked with the environment, waste processing, fair trade, economic growth or even the sharing of social « experiences » in their broadest sense) engage the future of our industrial societies. The space for critical freedom afforded to artists enables them to question and set in motion these society-related issues. A truly artistic stance is taken: « The artist as a citizen of the world». Art has become a veritable political and social experimentation field.
At the time of globalisation, recycling, enduring development and the whole ecological issue, the question is raised of packaging, of « packaging too much»… But in this way the question of the « truth» of things is raised, their appearance by the elimination of this «screen» (packaging). In this regard current creation (artistic but first and foremost citizen-related, social and political) should not manifest itself in the invention of the surface but through its elimination.
This deciphering of packaging is raised even in the choice of materials used by the artist in the creation of his works: wood, cardboard, Scotchtape, cement, nails, plastic, a veritable vocabulary of poor, everyday materials is pointed up, a vocabulary right off the building site; the building site, a unique feature of the manufacturing process (via the materials available and the working bodies).
The challenge lies in choosing lifestyles by inventing forms. Or rather, producing forms by inventing other ways of being in the world.
WORKS EXHIBITED
BLISTERS: thermoformed packages of various consumer objects serve as a mould for the formation of cement objects.
IBK SCOTCH TOWERS: towers made of several overlaid Scotchtape rolls, which are the essential element in the act of packaging.
FAGOTS (bundles) and CHUTES (scrap wood): Parts and installations made from the scrap wood found at DIY shops.
FLÉCHETTES (darts): random video of the formation of a work which cannot be finished.
CARTONS: cardboard boxes of various formats, upon which, in the inside and on the outside, various logos and pictograms have been stuck which can be found on cardboard packaging boxes.
BACS (trays): this is the conservation of magazine pages in ice tray assemblies whose final form and appearance look like those of a painting or collage.
KIT IBK, DIY 1361, work in kit form, edition of 100: as with Peintures en kit this is a work to be manufactured directly at home, thanks to a blueprint, a hammer, an assembly system and over a thousand nails! This model was carried out during the Paris Biennial 2006/2007.
PRESS CONTACT: Emmanuelle de Noirmont / Ludyvine Travers
Tel : +33 (0)1.42.89.89.00 / Fax : +33 (0)1.42.89.89.03 / E-mail : info@denoirmont.com
IMAGES 300 dpi available on our website / access codes on the request at the gallery.