STRUCTURES FOSSILES - Emilie Benoist

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Chabah Yelmani Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on September 10th of Structure Fossiles, Emilie Benoist’s first solo show with the gallery.

The four recent installations are dialoguing by their intern bases: those of the body, the architecture and the nature. They are also dialoguing by their processes: the chemistry revealed itself being the site of new experiences. An exploratory process that lead us from past: The Ancient World, to the present: the concern, towards a mental and prehistoric future.

The trip is cerebral, artistic and violent: from the fossilized structures dating from three billions years ago, those last organisms, in the future, will be able to overpass the man as a race before disappearing too in their turn. Also, rests of chemical fossils, which seem resulting from Precambrian microfossils, cover the shapes of the exhibition. Their bases remain us that more the fossilized structure complex is more the information bigger is.

Since the entrance of long blades MINERAIS look like extracted from the ground like Mégalithes in 2009. Their structures, geometric and weak, are covered of graphite and demonstrate the impoverishment of the fossilized energies. The raw material become tool then weapon, the installation echo to the last sixty years during which forty percentages of the civil conflicts were related to the natural resources.

In homage to the biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), SOURCES CEREBRALES is a series of twelve drawings forming genealogical networks issue from the living thing classification. They are coming out a research in the Central Library of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris in which the artist had formed a first set of silkscreen printings Ces Milieux in 2012.

From the top of the stares, the diptych EXTRAIT#1 and EXTRAIT#2 announce en background, the architecture. The two big silkscreen printings, in which the grey zones are associated to an acid coloration, plunge us into the hart of a flourishing culture and oppressive nature. The two images, extracted from the photographer Désiré Charnay’s work on the Amerindian cities, figure the recovering of the collected information into incessant “recollections”. At the time the trees of life already figured there.

In the underground passage, INFRA-MONDE immerses the visitor into an opaque and fortified building and succeeds to the sculpture Macro-monde in 2012: a shelter recovered by burgeoning and strange vegetation. Now the physical seclusion project us in a painful period of the history in which the nature seems to be able to re-appropriate itself a semblance of humanity.

*Extract from the Amnesty International report in May 2015.