Vernis à ombres - Benoît Piéron

“I exist in a vaporous state. I am truly glitter suspended.” It is from this feeling of buoyancy that Benoît Piéron conceived Vernis à ombres. Drawing on their experience of the hospital and cohabitation with illness, the French artist creates alternative representations of the spaces, bodies, and affects connected to it. Hallucinatory waiting rooms and laundromats, dimmed sirens used as nightlights, strobe light displays filtering beneath a hospital door: they expand familiar places through a practice of détournement that blends sculpture, installation, and gestures borrowed from crafts and DIY culture. The exhibition Vernis à ombres is presented at the Palais de Tokyo on April 3, 2026, at 10:00 a.m.\n\nTheir works offer experiences of suspended time, wandering, and reverie; they replace violence with gentleness, reintroducing desire and whimsy where these have been erased. More recently, Benoît Piéron discovered their intersexuation: a variation in sexuation denoting being born with sexual and hormonal characteristics that do not correspond to standard definitions of female or male bodies, a condition that affects 1.7% of the world’s population. This awareness has enriched the artist’s perspective on the political treatment of existences that deviate from norms and unfold beyond them.\n\nVernis à ombres takes shape from this realization. The exhibition presents itself as a set of gleaming strangeness; a “compass of disorientation” where landmarks blur and the imagination seeps in. Benoît Piéron unveils an abstract porn-crip film in the form of a shadow play, its projections animating a glass bay window. Various figures converge there: mathematical objects, sex toys, sewing patterns and casts of the artist’s body mingle their contours in a troubled choreography.\n\nPlaying on the plasticity of borders and standards, she reappropriates projection — the fantasized way society relates to intersex bodies — as an aesthetic form. Nearby, a few streetlamps accentuate the disturbance: their lighting function has been replaced by a spectacle of glitter, the same glitters used in the nail art the artist favors, which here fuse into a luminous, chromatic chaos that stretches perception. The glitters iridesce the bulb; pigments merge into the colorless, trading the desire to see everything, to light everything, to monitor everything for a kaleidoscopic spectacle of contemplation.\n\nVernis à ombres lets light filter into unstable, expansive zones. It is a scene where contours liquefy, measurements go awry; where time lengthens and reverberates. Fixed regimes reveal themselves to be mere variations, certainties are unmasked as fictions, and authority evaporates into glitter. Benoît Piéron works with the amplitude of the spectra across which our genders, desires, and existences unfold. She thus makes impermanence her material and places it at the very core of our identities.