Benjamin Loyauté

Benjamin Loyauté (born 1979) in Normandie, is a French artist, sculptor, videographer and design historian. Recognized for his installations and his researches on affordance, popular beliefs, fairytales, cultural and natural heritage, resistance movements and geopolitics of art, his work reconsiders the value of things in our contemporary societies. His works reflect a great diversity of mediums (film, video, sculptures, drawings, installations, and actions). Since 2015, his work has been show in various collective and monographic museum exhibitions. Still little known as an artist in France, the exhibition L'expérience de l'ordinaire was dedicated to his work for the first time in Paris at the Palais de la Porte Dorée and at Paris Nuit Blanche in 2018' in a village near by the house of Marcel Duchamp. His grandfather was taken as prisoner of war, displaced and interned in Germany at Stalag XI B. At 19 he had to work to finance his studies of history of art and became journalist and young reporter in 2001, obtaining his press card from the french '. The same year of 2001 the exhibition Moi, Zénobie reine de Palmyre was held in Paris. At this occasion, as guest journalist he was invited to visit Syria. In an interview with Florence Ostende he spoke about how he experienced the Stendhal syndrome in Palmyra which he never forget. At this period, he met Claude Levi Strauss in Paris, Paul McCarthy at Villa Arson in Nice and some others who left a lasting mark on is practice. In 2005 he decided to move on his own artistic and curatorial creative.
Curatorial
Rizzoli international published in 2006 his researches on Pierre Cardin 60's and 70's design including an interview of Marc Newson in Pierre Cardin Evolution. In 2007, he assist the curator in chief of the exhibition Design contre Design at Grand Palais Paris. In 2010 he curated the exhibition Prediction - After design with his first installation in collaboration with activist and artist Jackie Summell on the notion de “Confort” including his private correspondance with the Prisonner Herman Wallace. In 2011, he was one of the named international curators with Dunne & Rady to curate the first Beijing design triennial at National Museum of China. In 2013, his exhibition Nighttime Dreamreal have been selected to take place at Power Station of Art, Shanghai. In 2015 he have been appointed as chief curator of the Biennale internationale du design de Saint-Étienne and acheived a decisive turning point with his last curated exhibtion Hypervital before to concentrate solely on his own art production. He also taught theory as guest professor at Head Geneva and Ensci. He took part of a Design Basel Miami Jury
Work & Exhibitions
In 2015, the exhibited his first work of art in France and the Palazzo Delle Stelline in Milan hosted his first monographic installation. In 2016, he invested the "Aquarium" of Casino Luxembourg - Forum for Contemporary Art. In 2016, his installation Heterotopia and his film Le bruits des Bonbons / The Astounding Eyes of Syria As narrator of his chapters, he suggests in the last essay on his work What have You fond Out so Far? chapter 9 that this epic work is dedicated to a woman. Throughout the chapters, Loulou, a little Syrian girl, stands out as the main character of the story and becomes the symbolic heroine of this committed work.
In 2017, he made his first performance and became an itinerant seller on the markets and public space of candies "consumable sculptures" bearing the image of the enigmatic from the archeological of Mesopotamia. He also performed “non-sales” acts and offered the same consumable sculptures to answers to Trump Jr tweet. On the eve of a European summit on migration justice, his first two interventions entitled The Candy Heap Sale took place in front of Brussels stock exchange and in front of the European Parliament buildings symbol of all economic and political powers., a hoof-shaped street candy is a sculpture answering to the polticial power, composed of a neo-Louis XV desk with a candy heap displayed on it and a framed invitation to Trump jr and is Familly to visit the show. Only two uniques invitation does exist. From then, his work have been published in 2018 in reputed academic journal Future Anterior published by the University of Minnesota Press
"The artist place himself self on the border of what James C. Scott called infrapolitics (non violence) , as explained by Véronique Dassié, anthropologist and sociologist with whom he collaborated". He explained "we must repair a social amblyopia that prevents us from seeing correctly and deforms our restrictive vision of the world".You are alive is an artistic action. From 2015 to now, he went to a controversial auction of Native American Hopi and Pueblo masks from a large private collection in Paris. In a non-violent act, despite the security, he placed corn in front of a mask considered to be alive by Amerindian peoples. He decided to bid after that "the mask called him" as he said during the protest at the entrance the room of the sale. After having acquired the work, he decides to return it to the Hopi peoples and to contact them through a specialized lawyer. His work questions the power and possession of "living sculptures as living haritage" by encouraging collectors of contemporary art to purchase the only valid work to own, a unique and signed image taken from the mask and considered by the artist as a real transmettor.<ref name":8" /> The acquisition triggers restitution ( série Portrait d'ancêtres vivants).<ref name":14" /> In 2020, the mask will finally be returned to Hopi people.
Bibilography
*What have you found out so far ? 96 pages - 12 x 16,5 cm Texts by Alicia Knock, Gemma Daou. Language : french/english, September 2019 ( ISBN 9782373720808 )
*Heterotopia, Affordance & New Pragmatism, 112 pages - 15 × 21 cm - Livre broché. Texts by Géraldine Sfez, Véronique Dassié, Benjamin Loyauté, language : (English version), April 2017 ( ISBN 978-2-37372-034-1 )
*Le bruit des bonbons - The Astounding Eyes of Syria, 400 pages - 17 x 24 cm. Texts by Barbara Casavecchia, Clarisse Gorokhoff, Véronique Grandpierre, France Desmarais, Sophie Cluzan and Florence Ostende, language : french/english/arabic, June 2016 ( ISBN 978-2-37372-015-0 )
*Hypervital, Aesthetic consciousness? text by Benjamin Loyauté in Les Sens du Beau, 344 pages - Livre broché. Coll Directed by Benjamin Loyauté, language : french version & english version, March 2015 ( ISBN 2912808618 )

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