Ben Arpéa: De Mémoire
Upcoming exhibition
Overview
De Mémoire is the first solo exhibition of French artist Ben Arpéa at 193 Gallery, in Paris. While his artistic practice is extremely composite, embracing drawing, painting, sculpture, design and architecture, it, in fact, unfolds in an almost metaphysical way, over texture and sentiment, landscapes and still lives, memories and perception. In this sense, this new body of work becomes a tangible and visual rendering of moments lived by the artist, in a process-based attempt to remember. As Milan Kundera states that “Memory doesn’t record, it photographs” each picture appears to be a photographic painting, a window onto the conscience of the artist, that nevertheless resists fixity.
By reappropriating his surroundings, Ben Arpéa creates environments where what has happened melts into what will happen. The horizontal and vertical lines of his paintings become thus sculptures, skeletons of a flexible and living Memory. The multiple suns, constant protagonists of the show, generate a hypnotic light that fills up the space with a somehow dreamlike ambience, softly recalling the comforting warmth of a Mediterranean freed from its hyperbolic exuberance. The vivid colors and defined motifs at the heart of Arpéa’s OEuvre seem to generate, betwixt umbrella pins and sunsets, a feeling of dolce far niente leaning on the back of a shared solitude. Unlike David Hockney or even Edward Hopper, Arpéa does not need to include a human presence inside his paintings to evoke the individual’s solitary condition; he provokes it within the exhibition space. The audience is hence an integral part of the Work, led to contemplate their own experience before the artist’s. In this sense, the presented artworks— poetic compositions, textured with acrylic, oil paint, and sand— offer a sensible matrix of personal reflection that follows an individual flow, which irremediably becomes collective.
While they appear to be “elements of daily life,” the resulting sculptures and furniture form a coherent ensemble that delves the subject into the object, and vice versa. The audience is thus confronted with a myriad of individual perspectives that are strangely familiar, suspended in a spatio-temporal limbo between sensation and perception, zenith and horizon.
Through his multidisciplinary practice, Ben Arpéa engages with the spaces of 193 Gallery, inspiring a distinct atmosphere amidst dreams and memories, light and shadow, nature and architecture. Just as the souvenir, the image is not fixed; the more we attempt to remember, the more the story changes, and the more the image of the memory transforms into another. In this way, the paintings, sculptures and other objects that compose De Mémoire make it a site-specific exhibition that leads the audience to live the present moment, and relive the passed ones through a new angle; contemplation and intuition.
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Exhibition text by Yasmine Helou, Art Curator
