Camille Benarab-Lopez - Peines Perdues

About

Camille Benarab-Lopez's practice explores our relationship to images, their temporality and flatness. Her work begins by a gathering of visuals from different sources and of different status, which leads, through multiple techniques and mediums, to a process of assemblage and composition, as much pictorial as sculptural. Faced with the anxiety caused by the scattering and dissemination of images, the artist tries to hold them together, to assemble them by correspondence, by association, by dissonance. Aiming to contain the visual flow and to provide a space of abstraction to invest, she creates abstract, sensual and disconcerting works, where a double impulse of desire and frustration is intertwined.

With Peines Perdues, her first solo exhibition Camille explores her inability to create her own images, combined with her need to compile and interrelate those of others. How can they be cherished? What do they have to say? Can they be contained? The exhibition is built around the archive as a possible dialogue to be deciphered, and the image, no longer merely synonymous of content, becomes itself an object-container in which one deposits, encloses, shelters and protects. Both through her gaze and her gestures, Camille, attentive to images, invites us to gather with her our wishes, our mirages, our misses, and our secrets.

Camille graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (2014) and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2018). She was a resident at the Casa Velázquez - Académie de France in Madrid (2015) and at the Cité Internationale des Arts (2016). She is the laureate of the ICART Artistik Rezo Prize (2020), as well as of the FoRTE - Fonds Régional pour les Talents Émergents grant (2021), and participated in the 71st edition of Jeune Création (2021). In November, she will participate in the 2nd edition of the Biennale de l'Image Tangible and in the art fair Approche, along side GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO.