In his first solo museum exhibition, French artist Benoît Piéron invites us into the kind of a waiting room we are all familiar with from doctors’ offices and hospitals. Piéron’s waiting room is not a place to “kill” time, however, but a site of metamorphosis into which the outside world intrudes in the form of enigmatic objects and images. Snow globes, a chromatic cloudy sky, the play of light and shadow, a water leak, and the figure of a bat turn a forlorn space into a vibrant and lyrical setting.
Piéron’s artistic practice is informed by a lifelong history of illness. He deals in his work with how sick bodies are treated by the medical profession and by society as well as his own experiences of waiting and uncertainty, of care and intimacy. The artist thus transforms his own illness into an art of survival.