Work from the Collection

Le concept de Cordélia

Date of creation: 2010
Medium: Installation
Materials: Walnut, Bronze, Glass, Oak, Wax, Terracotta, Super 8 film, TV set, Television, Screen
Dimensions: Variable dimensions
Collection: Lafayette Anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin
Date of acquisition: 2013
Benoît Maire, Le concept de Cordélia, 2010, Collection Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin © DR
Le concept de Cordélia is an installation combining sculpture, hybrid furniture borrowed from the kouros, and two monitors broadcasting a video loop seen from the point of view of each protagonist. A reworked extract from L’Île de la Répétition (2010), these dreamlike images shot on Super 8 film present an allegorical dialogue between the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and a young girl named Cordelia in a contemporary living space. The conversation focuses on the feminine ideal embodied by Cordelia, as laid out by the thinker in the fictional Seducer’s Diary inserted in a theoretical treatise. She becomes aware of her virtual condition and, feeling trapped, complains to her creator. The mysterious ancient profile on a pedestal reflects the psychic intimacy of the two characters by appearing in both real and diegetic space. By highlighting sculpture’s potential to represent duality, Benoît Maire explores the limits of the materialization of the concept through its disruptive dimension, between field and counter-field, conscious and unconscious, reason and affect.

Text written by Veronica Doszla as part of the partnership between the École du Louvre and Lafayette Anticipations – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin.

Exhibition

Antidote 6
La Galerie des Galeries, Paris (France)
from 14 Oct 2010 to 08 Jan 2011

À propos de l'artiste

Benoît Maire

Born in 1978 in Pessac, France

Benoît Maire interroge les limites du figurable en proposant une mise en forme plastique de concepts, souvent philosophiques, grâce à des installations mêlant photographie, film, sculpture, objets et écriture. Il explore les écarts entre langage et vue, nature et culture, tout en interrogeant les processus de construction historique et esthétique. Dans un ultime appel à la sublimation métaphysique, son univers tend vers une archéologie de la sphère contemporaine avec son lot de contradictions.

Né en 1978 à Pessac (France), Benoît Maire est diplômé de la Villa Arson de Nice et de l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Il a également bénéficié du programme de post-diplôme du Palais de Tokyo à Paris. Il vit et travaille actuellement à Bordeaux.