Bénédicte Gross

In 2021, at the time of Bénédicte Gross's exhibition at Espace contre-contre, Nicholas Marolf wrote: "Bénédicte Gross knows the political science of forms. One night she dreams. She sees Europe explode. (...) The political décor collapses like the pomp of an archaic opera. (...) Faced with her canvases, the spectator can become aware, for a moment of freeze-frame, of the heaviness of what has built us, of what we are building: the décor falls on us in a flight of decline, making us eat the earth of our ancestors. Topographical, political, historical, Bénédicte Gross crosses time with the poetry of a playful Cassandra."

Since then, nothing has stopped the Delphic accuracy of these words. The stage has been set, or is about to be. Yet Bénédicte Gross does not present us with a heap of ruins. No crumbled temple or truncated column. Nothing in this work evokes (yet) the skeleton of the falls. Instead, there are flat surfaces, solids, angles, cubes, slabs, vertical or horizontal bars, all elements suggesting raw materials - concrete blocks, metal beams - and undoubtedly evoking an architecture in the making. Whether this architecture is that of a reconstruction, or the scattered elements of a defensive structure, remains to be seen...

In her desire to technically represent various materials, Bénédicte Gros also seeks to highlight their aesthetics, their poetry and their silent presence. By combining these elements, at first randomly and then increasingly consciously, she makes them interact and resonate with each other, to form disordered or arranged compositions, playing on perspectives or visual barriers. The result is an aesthetic of the ephemeral, with the potential to become.

Fragile or threatening, these provisional architectures are all set against a dark blue background, sometimes dominated by grey. If "all distances are blue", Bénédicte Gross's blue is stormy.