Aujourd’hui
His first solo exhibition is punctuated by someone else: Quentin Lefranc chooses deliberately to let Benjamin Collet interfere into his project, intervening discreetly but as early as the exhibition’s title: Smelled all unexpected, pictures seemed not know how to behave and ellipse became deaf as bare. *1
Both methods try to understand the transformations an artwork goes through, successively during its multiple formulations, and to what is at stake, the loss or the resistance of the images between these shifts.
Quentin Lefranc’s installations revisit masterpieces from Design, architecture, painting or record sleeves. The artist only keeps their inherent structure, allowing the feeling of the material volume of a painting, abandoning the wall to unfurl within the exhibition space, like a journey. The exhibition becomes a fiction of aesthetics, a proposition as a whole, acting as a painting composition.
Benjamin Collet verbally expresses the possible idea of the artwork’s new reading in a poetic way. Here, the yellow oilskin is a way to drift Quentin Lefranc’s theoretical and practical approach towards a new possible interpretation, like a Freudian split of this duo-show, this feature.
Once more, the younger generation of French artists show us how it can question art, history of art and aesthetics canons with such respect and such irreverence, by audacious diversions and unexpected interventions.
Quentin Lefranc was born in 1987. He lives and works in Paris. Benjamin Collet, born in 1984 lives and works in Lyon and Brussels.
*1. Extrait de l’oeuvre de Benjamin Collet: She smelled all unexpected, 2015, Encre sur papier, 29,7 x 21 cm. / Excerpt from Benjamin Collet’s piece, She smelled all unexpected, 2015, Ink on paper, 29,7 x 21 cm.