ART(ist) #7

Benjamin Loyauté

In 2018, Rubis Mécénat invited Benjamin Loyauté to present, for his first solo exhibition in France, the latest chapter of his work-in-progress, Experiencing the ordinary. With this exhibition, presented at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, and inaugurated for Nuit Blanche, the artist pursues his meditation on the magic of the ordinary and the importance of the intangible heritage in our societies, through a work that intertwines film, installation, sculpture and performance.

In the continuation of the exhibition, Rubis Mécénat supported Benjamin Loyauté’s newest book What Have You Found Out So Far?, published by Dilecta in September 2019, an epic and evolving story to be shared which decrypts the artist ‘s multifaceted work through daily life, magical objects and animism, which allow us to connect with our individual and collective history.

Benjamin Loyauté

Benjamin Loyauté (born in 1979, Normandy) is a French visual artist who lives and works between Brussels, Paris, Cusco and Madagascar. His practice investigates the invisible logics that structure and unsettle our relation to the world: perception, collective narratives, hubris and transmission. Through sculpture, film, installation and performance, he develops an ecology of meaning where each work becomes both an object of meditation, of dissemination, and a vector of affective, cognitive and cultural connections. Inspired by phenomenology, geopolitics and the social sciences, he pursues research on language and social sculpture. Recognized for his work on immateriality and societal transformations, he also questions the forms of attention capture and the value of the common good. His personal stories are never far: they resurface as unstable variables, turning his practice into a continuous field of experimentation. His works have been exhibited at the MoMA (New York), the Power Station of Art (Shanghai), the MUDAM (Luxembourg), the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration (Paris), Kanal-Centre Pompidou (Brussels), Hakanto Contemporary (Antananarivo), the MAMC+ (Saint-Étienne) and Somerset House (London), where he represented the first French Pavilion at the London Design Biennale 2016 with a hybrid installation and a film. Through his series WeArtChange and projects such as Voir la mer, Déposséder le mondeand L’Ultimo Regalo, he conceives art as a tool for attention, subjectivation, emancipation and active resistance.