Benoit Paillé: Alternative Landscapes

Benoit Paillé: Alternative Landscapes by Grant GillFebruary 24, 2013

Thanks to Grant Gill for today’s post….

This Friday marks my very first group exhibition that I have had the wonderful opportunity to be apart of. The Magic of Light at the PhotoPlace Gallery is exhibiting photographs that embrace the transformative properties that light holds. Upon my acceptance into the show I was excited to see a familiar image by Benoit Paillé, a photographer whose work I had been looking at for years now. Today I am sharing the work from his series Alternative Landscapes. His images make me feel like I have stumbled upon an event that connects each landscape with the next, like portals between worlds. I become seduced by the illuminations that are both starkly quiet and hypnotic.

Benoit Paillé is a 26 year old French-Canadian photographer. Although he started studying medical biology for 3 years, he turned to fine arts and finally became a self-taught succesful photographer. His photos were published in several publications around the world. He has had exhibitions in Canada, Japan, L.A, Barcelona, Moscow and Ukraine. He often holds workshops about photography and art around the world – Paris, London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Turino, and he collaborates with an advertising agency. His many project are about people, portraiture, and the night time.

Alternative Landscapes

I am first and foremost constantly experimenting with my environment, both social and natural. More specifically, my work focuses on questioning the limits imposed by humans.

How to push the limits or constraints that are self-imposed. Or with what I currently live, how to redefine the landscape with a luminous presence made. Playing with the boundaries between the conventions, I try to give my own definition of established genres of photography.

At the heart of this research, the light takes a prominent place in the sublimation process from the mundane topic or forgotten or neglected. I explore the light and I work as a sculptural object, as a matrix of what is given to us to see and interpret. Show the mundane seems to make extraordinary, and I apply this perspective to create repetitions, using a rigorous and obsessive serial work motivated by pure aesthetics.

On the other hand, I am interested in the narrative induced by the image, the story it inevitably produces. I have an approach that could be described as documentary, but only in appearance, because in reality I do not document anything and I rather seeks to transform reality. I want to show effect on people, things and the environment a clear view of stereotypes (auto) taught.

So I lean more on the constructed image. I build my images makes it possible to go precisely the point, that reveal a real neglected, considered too mundane for some attention. To do this, I often use artifice, false to show the real, because I believe that photography is not real, but creates reality.