Benoît Piéron – Waiting Room

Benoît Piéron spent part of his childhood in places of care that he continues to frequent. This intimate experience of the hospital ecosystem nourishes a sensitive and committed work, where illness becomes a potential for creation. Far from guilt-inducing visions, the artist offers alternative expressions and explores the plasticity of illness through various mediums and practices, such as sewing, existential gardening or wallpaper creation. He imagines installations, sculptures and objects, often designed from sheets from reformed hospitals, which weave stories mixing his personal history and the collective experience of disabled bodies, to give voice to an invisible community. Benoît Piéron's art lies in his virtuosity in intertwining the indivisible links between life and death from themes as varied as the sensuality of plants or the temporality of waiting rooms.

For the exhibition Waiting Room, Benoît Piéron continues his exploration of the complex relationships between the body, the medical structures that shape it, and waiting as a unique temporal experience. He transforms the square gallery of the Villa Arson into an immersive landscape, and invites us to inhabit a space between reverie and strangeness. At the heart of this arrangement, his series of Cairns, emblematic works of his work and made from reformed hospital sheets. These hybrid sculptures, stacks of worn textiles, evoke the layers of our existences, transition and impermanence. They stand like sensory beacons, marking an immobile journey through the porous borders of the body, in the contact zones between the intimate and the collective. The clinical coldness of hospital textiles is softened by pastel shades and by the hypnotic sound of effervescent tablets that resonates continuously throughout the experience. Behind this gentleness, Benoît Piéron delivers a poetic and political critique of the validist and productivist norms that govern bodies.

In parallel with the exhibition, Benoît Piéron will lead a workshop from March 17 to 21, 2025 for students at the Villa Arson art school. Inspired by feminist theories and practices, this research time, conducted with ten speakers, will aim to create a "safe space" to explore practices around slowed down time, that of waiting rooms. Essential to his work, the workshop practice welcomes a polyphony of voices, freed from productivist injunctions. It opens up a field of possibilities where fragility becomes a strength and waiting, an experience of self-reinvention.