The reactionary nature of self-reification
Whether one is a musician, painter, or photographer, the journey to become an artist can be understood as a long and painful enslavement. As one navigates the artistic field, various directives, clear or diffuse, come into play to signify the behavior that is expected to adopt if one wishes to continue this upward march towards recognition. Those who decide to play along will undergo these constraints as prescriptions to which they must adhere to succeed. This voluntary submission is not explicit but operates, like conditioning, through successive short subjugations: a distinction here, a contract there; an exhibition, an award, a sale, a few business proposals, and the deal is done.
Thus, artistic subjectivity is molded in a way that accepts the constraints of the artistic field even before they become apparent. The artist is trained, like the majority of our contemporaries, to become an "individual-trajectory in pursuit of their personal identity and social success, compelled to surpass themselves in an entrepreneurial adventure". The dilemma lies in questioning whether one is still an artist once recognized as such.
In this context, the struggle to keep art alive becomes a constant revolt against oneself. Recognition resembles a recuperation: it empties the artist of their dissident character and neutralizes their subversive potential through a series of rites that mollify their strangeness and transform it into something accepted and profitable. The more eccentric their art, the stronger the incentives to make it a tool of assimilation. Institutions do nothing but institutionalize many things that, by nature, resist them. And the pressure to conform to them is even stronger if, unfortunately, rather than being exploited by a boss, we have chosen to make art, with all the precariousness that accompanies it.
What the artist chooses to say about themselves thus embodies what Axel Honneth calls "self-reification," which is "the act of relating to one's own abilities and needs as something economically profitable." In this sense, the artist's biography is a condensed form of this phenomenon: the narrative we choose to tell about our own life, the way we portray ourselves as artists, serves not only to demonstrate our integration into the dominant apparatus but also to ensure that we ourselves are a product that "sells well".
The normativity inherent in self-reification makes no distinction between "this is who I am" and "this is what it is good for me to be". Every autobiographical attempt in the arts is therefore a representation in the most spectacular sense of the term. It no longer has anything in common with life beyond the violence it inflicts upon it. To represent oneself is to submit.
The quest for recognition in the art world paradoxically leads to a denial of recognition, in the sense that it inexorably becomes a refusal of otherness, which is itself the highest form of recognition
Art by project is a performative contradiction
What is commonly referred to as "art by project" is a translation of the dynamic of self-reification into the domain of artistic practice, starting with how the artist defines their art for themselves.
What is presented retrospectively as a "project," with internal coherence and an initial intention, commanding a beginning and an end, a predetermined approach and a will to materialize an idea that exists even before the project begins, is actually the product of experimentation resulting from a concrete change in material living conditions: a journey, readings, buzz and encounters, experiences stemming from this presence in the world which is the very condition for creating something that could become art. Imposing a predefined approach is a betrayal of reality if it is not the experience itself that dictates the content and form given to the experimentation that corresponds to the eyes of the subject who lives its precise contours.
The problem with art by project is that it dissociates the creative process from life itself. It creates a division between, on one side, life, and on the other, artistic practice. Thus, one might be led to believe that the artwork is indeed what is hung on the wall, curated, exhibited, and presented, whereas the artwork is nothing other than the result of a much broader process of transforming one's life to transform one's art. Art is what results from this uncomfortable yet fertile experience of transforming one's own life.
Therefore, art must first be unsettling for the one who creates it. It is a constant revolt against those things that hinder the expansion of the boundaries of our imagination. These boundaries, which can sometimes become conditions conducive to creation, include boredom, our habits, and the systems that protect them: capitalism, ideology, institutions, neoliberal realism, etc. It is up to each person to find what makes them comfortable and then to break free from it.
The neoliberal realism of photography
The propaganda that promotes, reiterates, and visually reaffirms the ideology of global financial capitalism, referred to by Colberg as "neoliberal realism," is inspired by Mark Fisher and his concept of "capitalist realism." This concept refers to the fact that, much like the Soviet regime and its propagandistic art ("socialist realism"), supposed liberal democracies also have their system of propaganda, sometimes more exuberant and invasive than that of authoritarian regimes. Unlike the latter, where the propaganda apparatus is centralized in the hands of the state, this new form of propaganda operates rhizomatically, organically and decentralized, yet producing the same result: the glorification of neoliberalism and its cult of consumption.
The idea of "neoliberal realism" succinctly summarizes how photography today is deeply embedded in the current economic system. Through the intimate link between neoliberalism and its constant and intrusive visual celebration in films, television, and advertising, images permeate public and domestic spaces to impose passive submission to the status quo and the impoverishment of existence that has become our daily reality. Whether it's one image or thirty frames per second, these visual devices sell us, much like in the early days of the cultural industry, a "total and unconditional consent." They work towards a pseudo-moral consensus advocating the superiority of the competitive principle and the "capitalist subjectivation" that accompanies it. Despite their appearance of freedom, what reigns is disarming conformity: work, produce, destroy according to an accelerating rhythm following the imperatives of economic growth and the dictates of a globalized financial market.
Adorno said, "The productions of the mind in the style of the cultural industry are no longer commodities but are fully so." It is clear that today, photographs in the style of neoliberal realism are distinguished not by being commodities, but by the mode of production that makes them nothing but commodities, fetishizing the world they represent and creating masses of admiring, docile, and dispossessed spectators. Photography thus functionally inserts itself into a world that finds in its spectacular doubling its mode of reproduction par excellence, which we will buy and consume in the distracted joy and comfort of home.
Colberg's thesis argues that it is impossible to discern this numbing effect of photography by analyzing individual images in isolation; rather, one must examine distribution channels, economic incentives, and the contexts in which the production of these photographs is situated. What often characterizes this system is the enormous economic and material resources dedicated to it, its excesses in post-production, its deification of celebrities, and its glorification of consumption.
The greater the subjugation of photography to this system, the more total must be the will to extricate oneself from it if one wishes to have any chance of escaping its effects (alienating and gratifying; alienating because gratifying). The temptation is strong in such a context to admit the contingency of our principles and to accept the rules of the game in which we participate despite ourselves. Succeeding in such an attempt is an achievement, and it is futile to hold oneself rigorously to the line, particularly when it comes to survival.
Transforming Life to Transform Art
The aim behind changing one's lifestyle, adopting nomadism, or living in a truck stems from a deeply anti-productivist ethos: it is primarily about not feeling compelled to provoke reality in order to create art, resisting the boundaries that freeze our practices into something separate from the daily flow of experiences. Feeling obligated to "go outside" to "take photos," imposing discipline to experience what simply appears: these are all ways to stifle creative momentum and subject the joy spontaneously arising from experience to a logic foreign to it. The goal of transforming life to transform art is to resist this compartmentalization of life that inevitably leads to fixation on the art object, which is merely the result of experimentation.
The desire to photograph a beautiful landscape or to get up at three in the morning to capture the Northern Lights is difficult to grasp. This stance perhaps unwittingly echoes distinctive codes of fashion shooting: a separate and falsely autonomous process, an external object to exploit, and a set of predetermined material conditions of creation with a supposedly casual but always pre-established purpose. Such practices solidify the rift between practice and the life process in which we are engaged. Presenting the products that result from these actions as art appears absurd to anyone who has chosen to create heterodoxically, outside established frameworks.
If art ultimately means not forcing oneself to produce it, then there is something profoundly absurd in compelling oneself to "produce art." In this regard, references such as "The Right to Laziness" (Lafargue, 1883) or the Chinese Tang Ping movement (translated as "lying flat") come to mind. The less we force ourselves, the less we stray from the routine our lives have become. If life is not conducive to creating art, then it is life itself that must change, always aiming to exert the least effort possible when it comes time to create. The subversion lies in creating the illusion of meticulous work while producing photos that appear deeply reworked, when in reality they result from an approach of doing as little as possible. The idea is to give the impression of effort where there is little or none.
Ecstatic Materialism
According to the famous and often misunderstood formula: "it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness". In terms of artistic practice, this idea translates simply into the realization that it is not our way of thinking that determines what we create, but rather the concrete experiences that lead to these creations, and which also have an effect on our way of thinking, seeing reality, and creating.
The experimentation that took place in the series "Visions" stemmed from a similar realization. The idea was to translate into photography what is actually perceived by the individual and not just through their eyes. Benoît on Ritalin does not see the same thing as Benoît on acid or Benoît on weed. It is not the eye that sees differently, but rather the entirety of a person, shaped by a series of factors such as culture, socialization, education, the experience of their immediate environment, and the substances they consume. "Visions" thus emerged from an awareness of how vision is an active construction of experience as well as a symbolic structuring, both cognitive and sensory, of the world around us. This pharmaco-experiential sociogenesis of vision, mediated by an objective order and its (altered) states of consciousness, leads to defining "visual culture" not merely through sight, but through the totality of the world in which sensory experience is given to the subject.
If the way we experience the world is determined by this same experience of the world, it follows that the creative process must focus on life itself rather than on the art or the phraseology surrounding it (ideas, concepts, approach). Art is the result of real experimentation, not a reflection of an experimentation that is abstract, conceptual, or limited to the aesthetic domain.
We cannot simply accept this realization and continue to apply for grants as if all our art were merely a reflection of this sacrosanct "artistic approach" that we are asked to embellish in order to sell it according to a self-reifying marketing strategy. There is no harm in not knowing it, as it is as distant from art as photography is from the object photographed. As a device, the artistic approach is primarily a vector for normalizing and standardizing practices, a technique of "discursive" subjectivation. It is fine to have one, but we should refuse to make it the centerpiece, shoved down our throats as if it were a right of citizenship in the established art world.
This discourse on practice is entirely secondary and even completely absurd from the perspective of what actually brings art into existence. Thinking in this way is nonsensical: it amounts to believing that we can modify the final result without changing the life that serves as its content and foundation.
When traveling, for example, Benoît Paillé does not decide to "start a project in this or that country". When reading, Benoît Paillé does not decide to "present such and such philosophical idea in his work". There is no initial intention followed by an experience that follows or results from it. There is no first a series of readings and then a creation that emerges from a desire to translate them artistically. Both occur in a single process. Something is created in the experience that is equally nourished by what happens as by the creative experimentation that feeds on what happens. Seeing with one's own eyes the destruction of the landscape, walking through places ravaged by industry, reading Rodolphe Christin while observing the ravages of tourism or while being a tourist oneself—these are not stimuli that can be classified according to their contribution to a pre-existing artistic project.
In China, there are security cameras everywhere. The idea of going to China to take photos of security cameras is absurd when you understand that these photos are the result of a series of concrete experiences that would be impossible to hierarchize chronologically. Rather than seeking to highlight "surveillance," the idea of photographing cameras and the absurdity of their location primarily stemmed from the boredom Benoît felt, caused primarily by the language barrier.
The same goes for Mexico. Suppose Benoît is camping for a week next to underprivileged children who spend their days picking up rocks for a meager wage. He is there. He has a camera and all his privileges. It turns out he knows how to take photos. The idea of showering them with rocks did not precede in any way the material conditions that led to this situation occurring. It is rather a creative conjuncture that was seized and resembles a game. Whether these rocks symbolize, retrospectively, the weight of life falling on their heads is a staging that comes as much from the children as from the photographer and the specific conditions of the situation and the interaction of these elements together. At no point did a clear and peremptory intention stand above reality declaring, "let's do a project on the poor children of Mexico to highlight such and such issue!" We have, concomitantly, life, situations emanating from the will to transform this life in a way that makes artistic practice more spontaneous, and the interaction of various elements.
This stance is completely contrary to what is expected of an artist when they submit a grant application. And this application is anything but harmless. There is a certain performativity in the way artists present their creations and meet the material conditions to bring them to fruition. Then we wonder why we expect a presentation text to excite our judgmental and aesthetic palates by presenting a completely mediocre object, as if mediation could compensate for its shortcomings. Anyone who perceives a contradiction in this discrepancy fails to see that it is, on the contrary, its most logical consequence. Making art by project is a performative contradiction: either one adheres to the project, and there is no substance left that could be called "art," or the creative process continues on its path, escaping any unequivocal apprehension, including imposing a coherence that precedes it. The work to push the boundaries of our imagination lies on the side of this second alternative.
The Dialectic of Control and Letting Go
Creating art while giving the impression of doing as little as possible is not the same as doing nothing. To genuinely feel like doing nothing requires a particular effort. For instance, building one's own truck does not happen by itself. Voluntarily extricating oneself from systems that enable a comfortable living is also far from effortless. Thus, photographic practice inspired by these precepts develops in the tension between control and letting go, two postures that mutually regulate each other.
Traditionally, the controlling aspect of photography manifests in its resemblance to subtractive synthesis. Photography proceeds by reduction: reducing reality, the subject, light, and so on. Like a reducing valve sculpting its object by successively removing layers of fresh clay, one frames and eliminates everything one does not want to represent. Choices are made, selections are done, and elements are removed: removing anything that does not fit the desired effect, any improper pose, any awkward expression, any supposed ugliness, and any possibility other than what the photograph itself dictates, like a mercenary following well-established photographic standards. It is about reducing, subtracting, and deleting, all to achieve a final product that must appear real, true, authentic, raw, and spontaneous. We crave rawness, and the more we get, the more we lack it.
Photography never escapes this inherent reducing characteristic of the medium, but it can rebel against its normative effects by withdrawing from the system that defines what is desirable. The dialectic that emerges between control and letting go is a response to this logic of reduction, against which resistance is mounted by replacing manufactured rawness with the rawness of our own lives. Embracing natural elements, photographing according to the weather, refusing any planning that includes managing an assistant, playing with grains of sand, water droplets, or snowflakes—this is a way to reclaim spontaneity through a medium defined by the negation of that spontaneity.
Wrongly, one might be tempted to believe that control lies in the technical aspects, as a prerequisite for expressiveness, while letting go corresponds to the purely artistic or experimental side of things, but reality could not be more different. It is illusory to separate the two as if art were not technical or as if there were nothing artistic in the meticulous work of the artisan. Photography, like painting or music, is technē. In the process leading to a photographic shot, there is certainly an applied methodology, an almost "scientific" process: the light square always in the same place, scenarios that repeat, settings recurrently adjusted, experimental recipes that endure. However, certain variables deliberately escape our control, such as the model's attire, sunlight, or outdoor temperature. Children remarkably defy any controlling grasp of the photographer, even when they are "placed" or told what to do.
Ultimately, more than directing the model, determining the setting, or manipulating light to achieve the desired result, the exercised control aims primarily to avoid falling into the trap of conformity that constantly awaits us. The photographer recognizes not only the moments they wish to capture but also those they avoid like the plague. The way to find what one rejects is to clarify oneself through opposition to clichés that repulse us.
In Praise of Aversion
As Pierre Bourdieu once said, "Taste is the disgust of other people's taste." In reactionary self-definition, we therefore oppose self-definition through aversion. In other words, we do not become who we are by doing what we love; we become who we are by distancing ourselves from what we hate. Visual literacy results from sustained and repeated exposure to countless photographs that infuriate us.
Against self-reification, there is no more effective remedy than self-parody, hence the reason to wonder how long it will take before this book turns against itself.
To give a concrete example, Benoît Paillé's first series is called "Strangers." The project consisted of a series of photographs of strangers encountered on the street motivated by a synthesis of what he hated about street photography: not its aesthetics, but rather the hypocrisy of the photographer hidden behind their camera, intruding upon others without permission in the moment of a fleeting click. Instead of subscribing to a cult of personality, the figure of the stranger, thus magnified, served to elevate ordinary individuals to the status of "personalities." It was a polite and roundabout way of saying "fuck you" to celebrities. The idea of using natural light was also motivated by aversion: aversion to flash, its artificial ugliness, and its immediate association with the world of fashion.
The rest of the story is known. It is through the parody of "Strangers" that his current style began to take shape. If the rejection of flash arose from a romanticization of natural light, this awareness led him to experiment with the most brutal and artificial flash possible. Other codes specific to his photography also gradually fell into place in reaction to subsequent projects: the desire to make clear that these are photographs, the simplistic straightening of perspectives, the rejection of creative framing, the presentation of a subject (sometimes a friend, other times a pole) standing straight as on a laboratory table, lines guiding the gaze towards it, the camera not fading away but instead testifying to the concern to never feign "real life" during the shoot.
The pagan use of flash, therefore, stems from an attempt to ridicule its serious use. The flash is that indexical proof that says, "photography does not capture reality, it creates it."
The Revolt of the Flash Against the Flash
The first thesis of "The Society of the Spectacle" reads as follows: "All of life in the societies in which modern conditions of production prevail appears as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." Representations are already everywhere, so there is no need to add more. What purpose does photographing this or that landscape serve, when surveillance cameras have already covered the entirety of existence? The pole is there to remind us of the absurdity of such an attempt and how advertising can, like an act of nihilistic magic, ennoble the most insignificant of objects.
Photography is the primary means of mystifying reality while also being the weapon that can be turned against the reality built in its image. It is the elevation of the fake, presenting simulacrum as the norm against which all life must measure itself. Photography is the privileged means by which the social relationship named "spectacle" has become the autonomous movement of images mediated by other images, subjugating life and replacing all authenticity with its own advertisement (advertising language), transmuting the false into something honorable, venerated, and sought after by everyone.
Thus, the flash is the photographic weapon turned against photography itself. It is the mediation that becomes its own object and parodies its pretension to mediate something other than itself. By making representations that do not hide their represented nature, by denying the pretense of truth in photographs and presenting them as what they truly are – vehicles of lies, even if done so exaggeratedly – it becomes possible to denounce their hypocrisy and criticize the authority they claim over reality.
The critical use of the flash has no other purpose than to remind us of the falsity of the entire photographic enterprise. The flash is the stereotype of ourselves. It reveals our presence, explicitly alluding to the fact that it is a photograph and not reality. It reminds us of the falsity of the represented cliché, which is nothing more than a visual experiment frozen on an SD card. If there remains any hint of hypocrisy in photography, the flash will cleanse it. It purges this hyper-individualistic ego that seeks to conquer a world-image that has become the impoverished reflection of itself.
The flash is the memory of falsehood in the reign of false consciousness, and that is why it remains true, precisely because it presents itself exactly for what it is: just another raw artifice, devoid of superiority, exposing the charade where all professionals have chosen to remain silent, play the game, and make cash.
friendship
The work summarized here results from an effort to break away. An experiment that lasted ten years and continues to this day. Ongoing, it takes on other forms and transforms. Some of the assertions above are questioned by Benoît Paillé's current practices, where photography is both memory and a capture of lived, past moments. But one never breaks away alone; one breaks away by participating in a collective. The creation of these memories pays homage to those friends who accompanied this gentle revolt. It would have been impossible without their presence, welcome, sharing, and support.Biography(issh) from 2013
On the road living in his truckhouse since 2013, Benoit Paille is an atypic artist, conscience agitator, creative genius, monstrously curious, absent and edgy. Soon in his life he became surrounded by second-hand smoke and Nicorette patches, which helped him to develop his artistic taste. Stoned on Ritalin for most of his crucial years, he undertook a bio-medical career until he fell into the downfall of photography. Self taught, he still became recognized rapidly in the field which brought him to exhibit his work around the world, but only when people ask for and not the inverse. On the counterpart, his many travels deprived him of any sustainable psychological follow-up which led him into regular crisis.
Far from looking for specific opportunities of creation, it’s in the primal impulse, the instantaneous situations that his images are revealing themselves spontaneously. Using colorful flashes to outline surreal representations “ I often see myself like an hyper realist painter with a 8x10 (but in reality it is a compact camera), my pictures document an anarchist state of mind ”. He want to create a dichotomies between the time of execution and the feeling of super-constructed, although it is as he say ''Anarcho Magical-Realism documentary"
Cultivating a predilection for casual people and territory, kitsch landscapes, frontier and liminal space , he’s seeking the anti- capitalism realism and the magic. “ Everybody can shoot a beautiful scenery or sunset, but I rather be a pataphysician, to apply myself to think about what others don’t ”. Always on the move, he realized a new record by braking more than 3 cameras a year in speed bumps and dirt roads. Even if he consider himself a product of today’s late capitalism realism, he tries to oppose his resistance by acting out against selfies, trends and foremost himself in deconstructi, even if he think he’s the best photographer he knows.
Of a disdainful nature, he yearns to be excluded from any renowned circle. Despite his international recognition, Benoit remains humble and open to others. He has the ability to intrude easily in the authentic life of people to wreck and corrupt their traditional habitat with technology. When children ask him what his THC vaporizer machine is, he lies and tells them it’s an asthma device. Wishing to step apart from institutionalized biographies, Benoit is making a lot of efforts to break through. Ambitious he masturbates only once a day. Either way, he’s putting a lot of energy in transgressing conventions. Art sustain him more than leftovers hot-dogs.
Far from looking for specific opportunities of creation, it’s in the primal impulse, the instantaneous situations that his images are revealing themselves spontaneously. Using colorful flashes to outline surreal representations “ I often see myself like an hyper realist painter with a 8x10 (but in reality it is a compact camera), my pictures document an anarchist state of mind ”. He want to create a dichotomies between the time of execution and the feeling of super-constructed, although it is as he say ''Anarcho Magical-Realism documentary"
Cultivating a predilection for casual people and territory, kitsch landscapes, frontier and liminal space , he’s seeking the anti- capitalism realism and the magic. “ Everybody can shoot a beautiful scenery or sunset, but I rather be a pataphysician, to apply myself to think about what others don’t ”. Always on the move, he realized a new record by braking more than 3 cameras a year in speed bumps and dirt roads. Even if he consider himself a product of today’s late capitalism realism, he tries to oppose his resistance by acting out against selfies, trends and foremost himself in deconstructi, even if he think he’s the best photographer he knows.
Of a disdainful nature, he yearns to be excluded from any renowned circle. Despite his international recognition, Benoit remains humble and open to others. He has the ability to intrude easily in the authentic life of people to wreck and corrupt their traditional habitat with technology. When children ask him what his THC vaporizer machine is, he lies and tells them it’s an asthma device. Wishing to step apart from institutionalized biographies, Benoit is making a lot of efforts to break through. Ambitious he masturbates only once a day. Either way, he’s putting a lot of energy in transgressing conventions. Art sustain him more than leftovers hot-dogs.
Et ici pour les amateurs de Bio et de francais !, La magicienne Amélie Abgral m'en as écrite une gangs. Parce-qu'au final une bio ça veux dire quoi ?
Benoit Paillé est né dans une colonie Britannique en 1984. Très tôt encerclé par la fumée secondaire et les patchs nicoret, il développe son goût pour la beauté. Drogué dès l’enfance au ritalin de 7 à 24 ans, il s’engage activement dans une profession bio- médicale. , tombe ensuite dans l’enfer de la photo. Artiste saisonnier, Benoit a étudié dans plusieurs écoles reconnues. Il expose dans plusieurs pays du monde ou la majorité des gens avec un travail normatif n’iront jamais. Dépressif, il parcoure le monde à bord de son campeur. Cela lui occasionne plusieurs problèmes ponctuels, comme l’érytheme fessier à force de rester assis dans sa sueur à 40 degrés à retoucher des photos publiées sur instagram avec comme salaire la maigre somme de 100 000 likes. Sa liberté de mouvement favorise l’émergence de ses visions et l’emmène à composer avec nombres de situations et de décors hétéroclytes. La wax l’aide à voir la réalité autrement pour créer des mosaïques psycho-symboliques. Aplats, couleurs over-saturées, kitch, dans l’excessivement banal, son travail reste centré sur l’objectif de décloisonnement et de questionnement iconographique des symboles dominants. Refusant la dictature des images, il construit ses photos comme des tableaux en mettant à l’avant-plan des objets frisant le ridicule ou la parodie. “ Je me voie parfois comme un peintre hyper-réaliste, mes photos devenant des fragments documentaires d’un état de conscience altéré.” Son approche de la photo est technique et méthodique tout en laissant transparaître un désir d’authenticité. Avant tout issu du domaine scientifique, l’artiste adopte la même épistémologie dans son processus photographique.
Ambitieux, il se masturbe seulement une fois par jour. Dans ses temps libres, Benoit combat les nids de termites qui envahissent les murs et vaporise de l’eau de javel sur les coussins du divan plein de pisse de chien. Sa passion se transmet dans tout ce qu’il touche.
Sur la route depuis 2013, Benoit Paillé documente ses passages par ses photos. Toujours en mouvement, la notion de questionnement du territoire occupe une partie importante de son travail. Ses photos remettent notamment en question le concept de propriété privée, de frontières et le culte du tourisme. Il expose l’humanisation, l’industrialisation du paysage en mettant en valeur ses structures et référents, clôtures, poteaux, coins de murs, dans une esthétique minimaliste surexposée. Benoit remet en question le processus photographique lui-même en le détournant de ses fonctions. Mais déjà, “ Montrer quelque chose, c’est façonner la réalité, donc mentir. La photo, c’est de l’instrumensonge” Son utilisation des flashs à outrance devient une manière d’inscrire sa présence dans l’environnement en conférant un aplat caractéristique à ses oeuvres. Son processus témoigne d’une volonté de rupture, de déstructuration des codes picturaux standards et somme toute de l’auto-dérision. “Il y a un côté humoristique dans mes photos, je trouve ça fascinant de réussir à mettre un poteau en valeur pour que se soit beau et touchant, juste par la facon dont je le présente, avec l’éclairage et le cadrage. Mes moyens sont techniques, à la limite du publicitaire et du mainstream, avec un sujet banal, ce qui en fait une grosse joke. C’est ma façon de questionner ce qu’on nous présente, de me positionner. N’empêche que ça manipule les gens.” Pour l’artiste, chaque milieu est propice à la création. Loin de chercher les opportunités, c’est dans l’instantanéité et dans l’imprévu que les images s’imposent d’elles-mêmes. Ses sujets sont les gens disponibles à proximité, au gré de son inspiration. il donne ainsi de la visibilité à l’anodin. La force de ses compositions réside en leur qualité d’intensité picturale et d’innovation. Quand Benoit paille entre dans une pièce, tout le monde a tout-de-suite un peu moins d’air. Il bouge et parle vite. Son aura fait exploser les porte-patios des cours de riches. Ses t-shirts sales et troués sont la vision de drapeaux épidermiques insalubres. La vitre de ses lunettes gigantesques s’illumine. Un coup de vent, l’inhalateur enclenché, pivotant sur sa chaise. Les clics claquettent, sur l’osti de gros écran. Il passe des heures monastiques, l’oeil illuminé, la souris tactile, chaque détail revu pour élever l’oeuvre à son paroxysme. Il scelle de fuck you toutes ses enveloppes. Ses diplômes sont encastrés dans la morve de fond de tiroir. Surexcité sa vitalité est insoutenable. Son rythme saccado majeur éreintant. Il fait chauffer les moteurs, pousse à son extrême limite tout et quiconque. Ses idées sont contrôlantes et pointues. “ Je suis un malade mental, je me prends pour un artiste, mais tout ca existe dans le vide. Je veux une médaille du gouverneur général pour prouver que je suis un artiste.”
Tantôt Hells angel, tantôt Hulk Hogan, il occasionne souvent l’hypertension ou l’arythmie. Quand Benoit Paillé marche, les lampadaires plient, les motos s’entre-choquent, les trottoirs fissurent, les murs ploient, les gens figent, les mouches pondent, tout le décor se plastifie. Sa vie et son art sont inséparables. Tout se joue, entre deux games de GTA-5, bein des toats au nutela pis un shooting de mur en béton en plein jour. Même s’il se considère lui-même comme un produit de l’hyper-capitalisme, il tente d’opposer sa résistance en s’insurgeant contre tout. Selfies, trends, #, surtout lui-même, même s’il est selon lui “ Le meilleur photographe qu’il connaisse.” L’art le nourrit tout autant que les restants de hot-dog. Malgré son succès à l’international, Benoit reste humble et ouvert aux autres. Il s’immisce facilement dans la vie authentique des gens pour détruire leur habitat traditionnel grâce à la technologie. Il ment aux enfants en leur disant que son vaporisateur à THC est en fait une machine pour l’asthme.
Hybride, hypermoderne et hypermobile, mi-psycho, mi-bio-polarisé, scientifico-admiré, curio-logiste, aimanté-simpliste, karmique et anti-académique assumé, Benoit Paillé préfère boire des cokes dans des bouteilles de vitres. Dédaigneux de nature, il souhaite être exclu de tout cercle social notoire. Il pousse la vérité jusqu’à son paradoxe, tout en se prenant très au sérieux. Inspiré du concept de Parrêsia de Michel Foucault, il désire rompre avec toutes conventions et par son mode de vie faire apparaître une vérité. “ Il approche la photo avec le même désir, en se dépassant et en essayant de se surprendre lui-même. L’expérimentation, l’errance et l’inattendu guident ses projets. Nomadique, ses photos
deviennent biographiques. Son regard, témoin de l’humanité à l’extérieur des cadres institutionnels. Ses sujets sont des gens de la rue, des inconnus prit on the spot, sans mise en scène. “ C’est facile de shooter un beau paysage ou un coucher de soleil. Je préfère encore être dans la pataphysique: “ m’appliquer à penser à ce que les autres ne pensent pas. Créer quelque chose d’unique, m’impressioner, même si c’est de l’utopie, tout existe déjà.” Cynique, Benoit s’inscrit dans une lignée épistémologique de volontarisme outragieux. Il a une collection de livres intelligents que personne ne l’a jamais vu lire. Il Est en conflit constant avec l’autorité, mais désire tout de même être exposé dans le plus d’endroits branchés possibles. Il répond des emails incohérents aux dirigeants de grosses compagnies qui veulent l’engager et lui donner beaucoup d’argent, et après angoisse de ne pas recevoir de réponses.
deviennent biographiques. Son regard, témoin de l’humanité à l’extérieur des cadres institutionnels. Ses sujets sont des gens de la rue, des inconnus prit on the spot, sans mise en scène. “ C’est facile de shooter un beau paysage ou un coucher de soleil. Je préfère encore être dans la pataphysique: “ m’appliquer à penser à ce que les autres ne pensent pas. Créer quelque chose d’unique, m’impressioner, même si c’est de l’utopie, tout existe déjà.” Cynique, Benoit s’inscrit dans une lignée épistémologique de volontarisme outragieux. Il a une collection de livres intelligents que personne ne l’a jamais vu lire. Il Est en conflit constant avec l’autorité, mais désire tout de même être exposé dans le plus d’endroits branchés possibles. Il répond des emails incohérents aux dirigeants de grosses compagnies qui veulent l’engager et lui donner beaucoup d’argent, et après angoisse de ne pas recevoir de réponses.
A posteriori (En partant des données de l'expérience), Benoit Paillé crée des oeuvres fortes empreintes d’originalité. Son labeur est centré sur le concept de l’Ad absurdo (Par l'absurde) qu’il exploite dans la sélection de sujets vulgare (Vulgaire, commun). Son credo reste accessible, Absit reverentia vero (Ne craignons pas de dire la vérité). Imprégné de son mentis scientiae (esprit scientifique), Benoit croit à l’assemblage du vivant selon un ordre aléatoire arbitraire tout comme dans sa photo, ou tout peut devenir sujet d’une vision Ars similis casus (L'art ressemble au hasard.) De omnibus dubitandum « Doute de tout. » Il remet toujours son art en question afin d’évoluer. Pour lui, la photo actuelle est vecteur de potestatem (pouvoir) et de propagande. Il est facile de manipuler l’opinion publique et d’orienter les choix individuels, selon les images qu’on nous présentent, Scienta potestas est (Savoir c'est pouvoir.) Benoit travaille adversus (en opposition) à ce mouvement, par son esprit analyticae et motus (analytique et révolté). Bien qu’il ait reçu plusieurs distinctions pour son cursus ( Curriculum vitae, parcours), il évite d’en faire un cas car ça ne le représente pas, car Testis unus, testis nullus (Un témoignage unique est un témoignage nul.)
bravo