2016EF023

"You have to take the time to watch the light shape and change the volumes and the material"

First, there is the experience of space, interior, its crossing, its volumes, its lines, its angles. “The concern to remodel to find the perfect shape. Something conceptual and harmonious with a logic in itself. Benjamin Plé is an interior designer. The matrix of its aesthetic impulses is formed in the form of grids and overlays of screen patterns.
The artist uses a sophisticated process. He works the canvas beforehand with a series of backgrounds; successive layers to erase the grain. Whether he uses watercolor or ink, his technique of choice is oil painting. Using a ruler, he structures, squares, searches for a rhythm in a random manner, without the gaze focusing on one angle rather than another. The mind is rhythmic, musical. He then hollows out the streaks with a knife, removes, erases to find the transparency and the shine of the background. It is light and depth that he seeks above all.
Benjamin Plé is a color specialist who probably has the greatest depth. With him, black is never pure, it is malleable, intensive, viewed under gray tones, cold and sometimes hot, which can turn to ocher. From the most brilliant to the sluggish, from the leaden gray to the nocturnal halo, the asceticism of the hues is voluntary. Under a perpetual play of light and shadow, the artist reveals the disappearance of the visible.
The moiré effects with a more or less wavy appearance, provide optical disturbances impairing vision, crushing planes, inversions of space where what is in front passes behind and vice versa. The multiplication and superposition of the concentric pattern contributes to the state of meditation, a certain elevation, dictated by the paradigm, verticality and horizontality of modern architecture.
The works are constructed according to a logical process. A fun arithmetic technique. One can imagine a practice of leisure, the art of solving mathematical problems, abstract games of the mind or problems of geometry.
The arsenal evokes the vocabulary of François Morellet or Bridget Riley for geometric construction and Soulages or even Geneviève Asse for working with the depth of color, figures he readily cites as references.
Benjamin Plé's painting remains abstract through the formal play it offers.
The geometric abstraction of its all-over motif dramatizes the vision and invites us to a show that includes us, engulfs us in a questioning with flaws, where the imagination overflows. His works come to reveal what surrounds them. The "relational" intention takes into account our perception to transport us to a quest for harmony, composition and balance.