Benoit Pailley is a french based artist, born in 1978. He is interested in installations and photography.
About “Antimemory project”
“Why remember?” asked André Malraux in 1967. Memories pile up in our brains, jamming them full. Must we also keep the physical traces of our memories? Their foot prints? These are the questions, sparked by a personal, intimate event, that the artist asked himself when working on the series « Antimémoires » (Antimemories). After a painful breakup, he found himself alone in New York, empty… But not quite: his drawers were crammed with letters, photos, unfinished projects…The traces of a painful past.
“Why remember?” “For who?” The relics of a past love don’t deserve to outlive a relationship. They must disappear, wrote Maurice Chapelan, because they are “the downside of our dreams”. Worse, they are the silent witnesses of our lives, our ball and chain, heavy and cumbersome.
Erase the suffering. Produce a clean slate. Better yet: block the mind, for memories never to pile up in it again. The drawers become a chest, the chest is filled with cement – that, raw, uncut, grey lava. It is no longer used to construct, solid and dependable, but to obstruct. It is a concrete slab over a grave of memories. A sealed window on an abandoned building.
Final option: the blackout. Poke holes in the bottom of the drawers to let the memories slip out. “Antimémores” is an answer to Christian Boltanski and his fear of the overstuffed wardrobe. It is also, above all, designed to tantalize the mind.
© Benoit Pailley | Artist Biography, Artworks & Gallery | http://www.benoitpailley.com
