Après la Mer, les Chaos

A transparent volume made of blown glass with a hollow in the centre is presented to us. We can observe it from different angles, turn around, look through it.
Wave, iceberg, ice cube, trace, cavity, storm, fragment?

Benjamin Rossi records reality and nature by sculpting them, he proposes an inventory of discrete, natural forms through different techniques – engraving, photography, explosion -, which he himself experiments with, with scientific rigour. He apprehends the world in a protocolary manner, with a certain coldness, like a laboratory technician. A graduate of the art and space section of the decorative arts in Paris (2014), Benjamin Rossi has a special relationship with volume.

Faced with ecological upheavals, but without being moralizing, the artist will take an interest in places, territories and take samples to create a library of the natural and geometric forms of the world. This ecological consciousness operates in a way of showing elements of our environment. Algae, salt, stone, earth… are transposed into new materials to arouse the public’s curiosity. Benjamin Rossi does a subtle work of smuggler.
With Après la Mer, les Chaos, the artist pursues a reflection on time, the pre-existing and the ephemeral. This sculpture bears witness to the Stampian era, some 30 million years ago, when a warm sea was present on the present day Ile de France and in particular the Forest of Fontainebleau. B. Rossi took a raw clay sample from a fault in this area, linking the choice of glass to the siliceous material of the forest. In this way, he wishes to preserve traces without altering the original shapes.

In all his work, Benjamin Rossi is interested in scientific processes, fascinated by the different techniques developed. Experimenting most of the processes himself, he questions empiricism.
Through these different fields of exploration, taking nature as his field of study, the artist gives rise to a writing of forms that is both raw and sensitive.

Benjamin Rossi

Born in 1986 in Angers (France) | Lives and works in Rennes (France)

Graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in 2014, Benjamin Rossi exhibits in France and abroad (Japan, Belgium). Identifying singularity, extracting it, isolating it, highlighting it is a way of representing what sometimes exists outside our gaze. It is a question of resisting the inertia of the moment, of risking ourselves to the implacable movement of the passing of time. Step by step, forms and counter-forms reveal unexpected details, redraw familiar surfaces, express the movement that shaped them, to finally show what we usually try to correct, what is hidden in the interstices, in the hollows of the world.