2017 "Camera Camera" Prize

Best Room Award

Supported by the WindsoR Hotel

Alexandre Benjamin Navet – Glimpses

On the occasion of the first edition of Camera-Camera fair, Double V Gallery invites the artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet to take over the walls of room 6, in a discharge of colours, a frivolous and immersive atmosphere.

As soon as you enter the room, pictorial research invades the place: amidst the curtains, sheets and tables, the artist’s pastel drawings pay homage to the great masters of the 20th century, through still lifes of workshops, like portraits in hollow. Facing them, a diptych on canvas depicts the artist’s own studio, whose overhanging and exaggerated character suggests the games of ego and obsession that underlie artistic creation. 

Other works in the space show a wider spectrum of the contemporary scene, with a tendency to explore less traditional media, such as Alice Guittard’s photographic emulsions on marble and Amandine Gurruceaga’s tanned skin – which lend an intimate atmosphere to the bathroom – or Ugo Schiavi’s furtive casts on the balcony. A body of three-dimensional works, which are on the borderline between sculpture, performance and photography, and which, through their presence, powerfully reaffirm the classic and timeless character of paper or canvas. 

Finally, this opposition between usual or polymorphic supports constitutes a discourse articulated around the way the artist constructs himself in relation to the history of art and his predecessors, and the way in which he will be inspired by them or free himself from them.