Furini Arte Contemporanea Via Cavour, 6 52100 Arezzo Italie
On a perfect sunny day a huge tarpaulin, hung to protect and screen a building under construction, comes partly loose from its support and is lifted by the wind. A fairly nondescript event in itself that might leave one totally indifferent, apart from the problem it creates for the site workers who have to attach it again. For Benoit Pailley, however, it is something more than a minor inconvenience on a building site: there is an implied, metaphoric meaning, an aesthetic quality that becomes the allegory for an existential hypothesis.
The French artist decides to capture the moment, halting the movement by taking photos from below looking up, and to record the flapping motion with a digital video camera. The result is the installation Swimming Blue, created specifically for the gallery, in which a series of images of the tarpaulin, all of them different, accompanies the viewer towards the heart of the exhibition, where the static nature of the photos is exchanged for two video projections in different formats.
The spectacular dance, limited by the impossibility of extending its movement across the entire surface of the sheet, which in part is still attached to the building, assumes a powerful conceptual value in Pailley's images. The heavy fabric, swollen by the wind like a sail on a ship that cannot put to sea because it's anchored in port, becomes a metaphor for every attempt to escape from inner and social restraints and impositions. Prey to the uncontrollable forces of nature it asks the observer to empathize with its enormous effort to release itself into a peaceful sky, and to emotionally participate in its attempt to escape into the immense blue expanse. But the work also leads the viewer to reflect on the role of the sheet, used to obscure and protect the fragile, amorphous skeletons of urban buildings. Its principal functions – offering protection from the elements and concealment so that work can take play in privacy – reveal by their failure just how defenceless and fragile constructions are, including psychological ones, which we seek in vain to protect by using various superstructures.
Swimming Blue, already shown as a video in Pailley's first one-man exhibition at the Flux Laboratory in Geneva, returns to some themes the artist has considered before. His attraction towards the coverings on objects, protective membranes and insulation coatings, whether they're heavy waterproof canvas, scaffolding or light clothing, was already evident in the series Façades, inspired by building work which constantly changes the appearance of New York's streets. In those works, the scaffolding around buildings became the cue for recreating similar situations in the studio in the form of installations consisting of a tangled mass of metal clothes hangers, which on the one hand simulated the metal grid of scaffolding, and on the other served as a means for displaying clothes. The large protective tarpaulin also recalls fabric, in that it is a light, flexible and mutable material, adaptable to any support, and above all a symbol of protection, a cover for nudity and a security. But fabric is also the raw material of clothes, which Pailley continues to photograph, integrating them into particular scenes and installations he creates, but without them ever being worn by models. Therefore in its own way Swimming Blue returns to a part of the imagination of an artist who does not hesitate to address in his work the central issues of existence with originality, delicacy and considerable disenchantment.