Bureau Doove

Benoît Géhanne works in series – paintings, volumes, drawings, photographs – each title of which states the process used: retention, retreat, bias, projection, arrow…

He draws his plastic vocabulary from his environment, particularly industrial infrastructures: through photography, he indexes found forms that echo the formal solutions of abstraction. By taking and making visible these fragments of space, architecture and objects, he questions the impact of abstract art on the standardisation of popular culture and urban spaces.

Géhanne then re-injects all or part of these images into his pictorial practice. Isolated, cut out, these found forms are then detached from their referents; they lose their legibility and gain in autonomy. He thus explores this “domesticated” abstraction, making gestures that reiterate a process of abstraction: an abstraction that is not non-figurative for him, but which is claimed in the gesture of extraction, that is to say, literally, of abstraction of the fragment that will become the work.

Benoît Géhanne probes the resistance of forms, testing their displacement in an economy of the gaze, where the act of seeing is directly linked to appropriation and identification. His pieces ultimately question the way in which we are led to see and look at everything.

He produces traps for the gaze, plastic spaces that generate doubt, that suspend understanding, leading those who consider them to reinvent their gaze.

We worked together for the exhibition Troupe/Troep at ChezKit, Pantin, 2020 and Arts Festival Watou 2023 /kom.po’zi.ci.o:/

We also published his work in the project Empirical Nonsense Daily on 26 March 2021.

Find more info on his website.