Windowmuseum

The #windowmuseum is an artistic platform, created by Lola Meotti and Hervé Charles, whose objective is to work together with the most important cultural institutions by proposing to exhibit works which are visible from the perspective of public spaces. In the framework of this collaboration with the IKOB, the #windowmuseum is presenting the works of Benoît Jacquemin.

This choice is anything other than an idly-made decision: The artist, who recently graduated from the ENSAV la Cambre (BRUSSELS) from the region (THEUX), represents a generation of young, enthusiastically committed creators of art whose concerns have great contemporary relevance. Filled with the urgency of being rooted in raw, prosaic material, Benoît Jacquemin relies on his practical experience as a photographer when he turns to working in spatial sculptures which are marked by the precise gestures of the craftsman handling wood, iron or concrete. Common to the three works presented at the IKOB is their inspiration from buildings and symbolic sites that contain history. They constitute three ‘strategies’ which the artist employs in order to create sculptural works which are the pattern, the model and the utensil.

The first work installed outdoors, MUR (2019), is a construction element which Benoît Jacquemin found on the Abbruchgelände: waste disposal area / ?? of an exhibition space in his native village. A sample taken and then set up as a sculpture and monument which becomes both an object of remembrance and the witness to a reality, namely the disappearance of an art space. Arising beyond this reality is a global inquiry into the world of culture. Can we only hope in the near future to produce ruins before they have even existed as a work of art? This penetrating question is absurd and ironical but literally dangerous when a sculpture is born out of the remains of a site which should have accommodated them.

He also creates a ruin with the work CITY (2019). In conformance with the same pattern that became a monument, Benoît Jacquemin uses the model to cause the codes of architecture to collapse by setting them in concrete. He forms modules out of totalitarian architectural elements (stairs, columns, arches) which he combines into an anarchical organisation inspired by the precarious urban constructs of slums.
The whole thing is placed on a light-box which complements the dramaturgy and presents this phantasmagorically rendered city as a theatrical spectacle of the relationships, installed in our current society, between domination, power, precariousness and urgency.

The final piece, CINECITTA (2018), can be read as a dispositive in the sense of Foucault: A mirror attached to one of the windows of the facade reflects our image, issues a challenge and includes us in spite of ourselves. Engraved on this mirror is the sentence ‘La cinematografia è l’arma più forte’ (‘Cinematography is the most powerful weapon’) which was displayed in 1937 during the dedication by the Duce of his Italian version of Hollywood, the Cinecittà. Here as well, Benoît Jacquemin makes reference to history in order to remind us that art is a weapon: both for issuing propaganda and for defending freedom. Concealed behind the image of reality filtered through an artistic language is always a message, a postulate, an ideology. Here the artist is inviting us not to forget this message and to endeavour repeatedly to decipher it.- Lola Meotti, curator