BENOIT LEMERCIER: Fragments de Métaréalité
Galerie Dutko is pleased to present from May 23rd to June 23rd, 2024, "Fragments of Metareality," a solo exhibition by the French artist Benoit Lemercier. Ten years after his last presentation at the gallery, this exhibition is an opportunity to discover his recent works and his new series: "Hénosis." Benoit Lemercier's work aims to question the invisible in order to enchant the visible. "Enchanting our daily lives is my duty," says the artist.
BEYOND THE VISIBLE
Benoit Lemercier offers an artistic vision of the mysteries of the world around us. Drawing on various scientific theories, he invites us on a journey into the heart of this unknown. The exhibition at the DUTKO gallery, entitled "Fragments of Metareality," presents wall sculptures and monumental pieces from the "Supercords" series, as well as canvases and drawings from the "Henosis" series.
METAREALITY
"For Benoit Lemercier, reality is not the real." He considers the real as the entirety that constitutes the universe. This universe is much larger and more complex than what we can conceive and perceive. Our five sensory receptors — sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch — do not allow us to grasp reality as a whole.
"From birth, thanks to our cognitive functions, we gradually begin to build our own world and form our sensory bubble, comfortable and intimate. This bubble, with elastic and shifting contours, is both our field of freedom and our prison, both Matrix and Plato's Cave. This bubble... is our reality, but it is not the real."
Benoit Lemercier calls Metareality this part of reality that we do not perceive, this world made of information, waves, and energies that contribute to the "creation" of our reality. Metareality is what surpasses and encompasses our reality to form the real.
The artist strives to give a poetic form to this Metareality that we cannot apprehend. He tangibly shows the invisible links that connect us to this often counterintuitive environment. "The invisible has the face of truth," he says.
SUPERCORDS
To structure his work, Benoit Lemercier organizes his production into series. Each of them represents a fragment of this Metareality:
The Hypercubes series offers a representation of the fourth spatial dimension through a set of geometric, angular sculptures in black, which open perspectives and lines of flight towards infinity. In the artist's iconography, it symbolizes the infinitely large.
The Supercords series, based on the quantum theory of the same name, gives form, through an interweaving of white ribbons, to the infinitesimal undulations of the smallest constituent of matter. This quantum theory suggests that tiny vibrating strings generate subatomic particles. Here, it evokes the world of the infinitely small.
The Dark Matter series models a solid vision of cosmic energy, hidden and undetectable.
The brightly colored canvases of the Lights series present a dreamlike interpretation of the path taken by waves and luminous particles.
HENOSIS
The Henosis series seeks to represent what scientists call the fusion point of theories, namely, that improbable moment where quantum theory meets relativistic theory, where the infinitely small meets the infinitely large. "Henosis" is an ancient Greek term that translates to "union" or "unity."
Benoit Lemercier imagines the result born from the process of unifying these two seemingly opposed fields of reality. He touches upon one of the greatest scientific mysteries here.
To represent this cosmic duality at an intersection point, he brings together his Hypercubes series, symbolizing the infinitely large with angular forms in black, with his Supercords series, an image of the infinitely small with curved forms in white. By merging these two archetypes with inverse polarities, he elaborates, in a way, his own Taijitu, in search of harmony and perfect balance.
