- Venue
- Permanent Gallery
- Starts
- Saturday, March 29, 2008
- Ends
- Sunday, April 27, 2008
- Address
- 20 Bedford Place Brighton BN1 2PT
- Location
- South East England
PERMANENT GALLERY presents: FOLLOWING LINE, an exhibition of intricate constructions by the French artist BENOIT CARPENTIER. BENOIT CARPENTIER’s work crosses the boundaries between drawing, painting and sculpture, with the finished pieces being seemingly fragile, complex constructions of clay-coated fabric. His work is open to chance, incorporating simple aleatory processes that determine the final outcomes. Enquiry into and through the line is at the core of BENOIT’s work: all the pieces start off as abstract drawings. BENOIT cuts away the negative space within the drawings, leaving only the lines themselves intact. In so doing his work crosses the threshold between the 2D and the 3D – from being concerned with surface and shape (drawing), to being concerned with spaces between and physical properties of materials (more typically painting and sculpture). What follows is that the lines, which are now a thin and fragile lattice, are plunged into clay to make them rigid. By allowing gravity, tension and the materials’ properties to interact as he assembles the layers, BENOIT’s intricate constructions blur the distinction between positive and negative space. As he puts it, these explorations of material and form “resist” the walls they are mounted on, questioning their original status as drawings and embracing an objecthood of their own.
