Inauguration Cosmogonie @Damien Beneteau

Lycée Léon Blum, Créteil, France, 8 décembre 2017

 Cosmogonie 
The installation Cosmogonie is displayed as an interior rotunda, borrowing its shapes from horological mechanisms as well as from the planetary mobile. As a metaphoric statement on the genesis of the world and the cycle of time, it presents strong formal convergences with minimalistic sculpture. Here, Damien Bénéteau reduces a representation of cosmos to the human scale and to its minimal signifier, materializing in situ his poetic vision of the Origin.
The static suspended layout of the central sculpture combines in an ethereal composition three astral spheres and several thin hanging plates, slightly curved and tilted, in the manner of a deconstructed planetarium, crossed over by mysterious metallic totems. The sculpture is surmounted by a ring, in which a needle – its tip equipped with a lamp – carries out a minute long revolution. The structure’s cold geometry, the depth of the matt black and the material’s shine shape a solemn, sober and dynamic composition whose volumes are constantly redrawn by the light. Induced by its reflection on the material’s surface, the play with texture variations is cadenced by the hypnotic regularity of the rotating arm, offering the opportunity of a serene and dreamy contemplation.
Responding to this general principal of roundness, Cosmogonie is surrounded by an inclined plane that allows students to stop there for a moment. Located in a passage way, a high school hallway, this meeting point invites passers-by to pause, to retire from the temporality of a school day in order to embrace, for one moment, the rhythm of an infinite loop, that of perpetual movement.
FG, mai 2016