Vernis à ombres - Benoît Piéron

“I exist in a vaporous state. I really am glitter suspended in the air.” It is from this sense of floating that Benoît Piéron conceives Vernis à ombres. Drawing on experiences of hospital life and living with illness, the French artist creates alternative representations of these spaces, bodies and the emotions bound up with them. Hallucinatory waiting rooms and laundries, rotating beacons dimmed into nightlights, strobe-light shows filtering beneath a hospital door: he expands familiar places through a practice of repurposing that combines sculpture, installation, and techniques drawn from arts and crafts and DIY (do it yourself) culture.

His works offer experiences of suspended time, wandering thoughts and reverie; they replace violence with gentleness and reintroduce desire and fantasy where these have been banished. More recently, Benoît Piéron discovered that he is intersex: a variation in sex characteristics that means being born with sexual and hormonal characteristics that do not fit standard definitions of female or male bodies, and that concerns 1.7% of the world’s population. This awareness has enriched the artist’s perspective on the political treatment of lives that depart from norms and unfold beyond them.

Vernis à ombres takes shape out of this realisation. The exhibition unfolds as a setting of glittering strangeness; a “compass for disorientation” in which points of reference blur and the imagination seeps in. Here, Benoît Piéron unveils an abstract crip porn* film in the form of a shadow play, its projections animating a large window. Various characters come together: mathematical objects, sex toys, sewing templates and casts of the artist’s body mingle their outlines in an ambiguous choreography.

Playing with the malleability of boundaries and standards, she reclaims projection—the fantasies through which society relates to intersex bodies—as an aesthetic form. Around it, a few streetlights heighten the disruption: their lighting function has given way to a spectacle of glitter, the kind used in the nail art the artist loves, which merges here into a luminous, chromatic chaos in which perception expands. Glitter lends the bulb an iridescent sheen, pigments combine until they become colourless, exchanging the drive to see everything, illuminate everything and monitor everything for a spectacle of kaleidoscopic contemplation.

Vernis à ombres lets light filter through into unstable, expansive zones. It is a stage where outlines become fluid and measurements go awry; where time stretches and reverberates. Here, fixed systems reveal themselves to be mere variations, certainties turn out to be fictions, and authority evaporates into glitter. Benoît Piéron explores the breadth of the spectrums across which our genders, desires and lives take shape. In doing so, she makes impermanence her material and places it at the foundation of our identities.