Benoit Platéus
Herminia 01
2018
Xerox Print and Oil Paint on Wood Panel
23 × 30 cm
Unique work in a series of 9 variations, signed by the artist
Out of stock
about this work
Benoit Platéus’ most recent works are paintings that hover between figuration and abstraction. During his many trips to the United States, Benoit Platéus became fascinated by the wooden telephone poles he saw in rural areas and the semi-industrial suburbs of cities. These poles are often used as messageboards: people staple messages on them about a lost dog or a bicycle that they’re trying to sell. These paper posters disappear of course, but the artist loved these wooden poles full of staples – as an image in itself, but also because of the lost messages and the staples once held. Intuitively, Platéus started making frottages of the poles. Frottage is a technique where a sheet of paper is placed on a surface and then rubbed over with a pencil or wax chalk, so that the texture or irregularity of the surface transfers a certain image or pattern on the paper. Benoit Platéus then uses these impressionistic frottages as the starting point for large paintings – like a kind of inverted graffiti, where images are taken from the street to the studio and then transformed into an autonomous painting. He showed a large selection of these paintings at his solo exhibition at Bozar, Brussels early 2018.
For this series of works, Platéus started each work from the same frottage. He made a xerox print of the frottage and glued this upon a wood panel, after which he painted the print with oil paint – erasing certain patterns and accentuating others. The nine different works that Platéus made like this show a clear genealogic connection, but are nevertheless nine unique paintings
about Benoit Platéus
Benoit Platéus is a Belgian artist who uses various media to investigate the disappearance and (re)appearance of the image. He starts from clichéd – typical and recognisable, easy to read – images, which he then distorts and makes difficult to read in different ways, giving them a completely different, open meaning.
The result of this process can be a drawing, collage, photo, sculpture or painting. This is because Platéus really digs into the specific characteristics of each medium or technique, in order to explore their limits. Once he feels that he has reached those limits, he continues with another medium. Because of the different media Platéus uses, it may seem as if his different series of works deal with different issues, when in fact, the works always focus on the same thing: making an image disappear and appear simultaneously, in order to expand its content and our reading of it.
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