Exhibition 14.01.- 29.01.2011
Opening : 14.01.2011
Bertrand Planes
the place we’ve been
New Galerie @ Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin,
10243 Berlin, Strausberger Platz 8
The New Galerie is pleased to present Bertrand Planes solo exhibition The Place We’Ve Been at Galerie Ben
Kaufmann in Berlin. All of the works will be made on site in the gallery and are part of an ongoing series called the place we’ve been.
A broken disco ball lies on the ground while the cable from which it hangs continues to rotate in the ceiling.
On the walls, the shards of light flicker, the party continues. The title of this piece from the series the place
we’ve been is where I met her.
the place we’ve been is a series of environments, of construed situations. They evoke an almost abstract
melancholy, the melancholy of sentimental love songs. Bertrand Planes sets up dreamlike scenes whose
purpose is to be explored, simply. In the room at the back of the gallery, Bertrand Planes realizes a Bump it!, a procedure developed and appliedrecurrently in a series of artworks by the artist. An object or a group of objects is uniformly paintedwhite, and a video-projection then re-colors, re-textures the surfaces. The action directly evokes cybernated modes of thinking and practice in which the constitution of a digital object is de facto realized in two steps: a neutral volume is created whose surfaces are then dressed. The absolute distinction of surface / volume, so evident on a computer screen, takes place in “real space.”
Formally, the volume is a “white-on-white” sculpture: the constant looped reminder of its original texture makes it abstract to the extreme. Applying the Bump it! allows digital methods to decompose the properties of
an object, and to join and modernize the “classical” thought process of the perception of its innate properties
; but the Bump it! is also a surface of projection able to undergo infinite variations.
In the gallery's middle room : The place we’ve been 4 : another different place. Paintings by amateurs are bought cheaply at a flea market. They are then photographed and painted white. They are brought to a kind of makeshift “black studio”, a “photographer studio”. The paintings are recovered by a photosensitive white paint : liquid light. The negative image of the former painting is projected on the white surface, and then developed and fixated. The painting now shows, in black and white, what’s under the white paint. It’s a photography, a radiography, but still a painted surface. The process is quite rough and produces at the same time pictorial and photographical effects.
Bertrand Planes uses technical, even technological, means that he develops himself. He calls his practice
“high low tech”—the utilization of technology that is accessible and widespread, but whose possibilities are
deployed by the artist. Echoing multiple social changes, of these new tools, of these new points of view. A
certain number of installations employ trompe l’oeil tropes, as well as mental scenes and experimentations
that perspective in painting have proffered throughout history.
Bertrand Planes is born in 1975. He lives and works in Paris.
