Bénin
Aurélien Mole cultivates a dandy artist approach, combining sophistication precision and poetic of the making.
His work plays with insight and awareness of both historical and artistic references. His project for Passerelle Centre d’art co,temporain mischievously entitled "Benin" – somewhere between nonchalance and exoticism – deals with history of art and technology especially photographic, as objects of study as well as creation supports.
In the center of the whole project, a film draws inspiration from Hippolyte Bayard’s researches. He was a photographer, an inventor and an employee of the French Ministry of Finance at the end of the 19th century. Bayard used to spend his lunch breaks on the rooftop of the administration where he dispayed plaster statuettes on a black backdrop facing a camera obscura, to obtain images silhouetted in white on a black paper he invented. As often with Bayard’s works, the artistic part takes over the reserch one. The plaster statuettes, originally chosen for their whiteness, are multiplying in increasingly baroque compositions. In the end, that images Bayard records form a kind of plaster curiosity cabinet whose purpose is only distantly its two-dimensional rendering. The film is build on these compositions that provide a kind of universal museum reduced to its simplest expression. It’s a time-lapse presenting nine sunlit objects which are also presented in the exhibition.
Pursuing Bayard’s experiments, Aurélien Mole studies and plays with the conditions of appearance of things, with their tangibility in representation and production.... [lire plus]
