THE LEAK | BENOÎT PIÉRON

The works of the French artist Benoît Piéron (Ivry-sur-Seine, 1983) reflect, with gentle and melancholic tones, his personal history: due to fragile health, the artist has spent a considerable amount of time in hospital waiting rooms and medical studios. The solo exhibition “Benoît Piéron. Monstera deliciosa,” displayed at mumok in Vienna, precisely reproduces one of these places. However, in Piéron’s project, the waiting room is not a place to remain motionless, frozen, waiting for an external force awakening us from lethargy. Instead, it becomes an intimate space of metamorphosis and an opportunity for change, where the real world intrudes only through peculiar stage objects.

The leak (2023) is essentially a yellow cleaning trolley, the kind used to contain water for washing floors. The cart is positioned in the center of the room, near the wall, just beneath a hole in the ceiling from which small drops of water descend, slow but steady. Delicate pastel-colored clouds are painted on the ceiling from which the drops fall, and on the walls, one can observe spots of light similar to those created by sunlight filtering through branches. The cleaning cart, though not entirely out of place, disturbs the almost dreamlike atmosphere in the room, abruptly bringing the viewer’s attention back to reality.

Upon closer inspection, it can be noticed that the bucket of the cleaning cart is not filled with water, as it should be. Instead, its content consists of hundreds of small pink pebbles. The water is, in fact, drained from a tube connecting the base of the bucket to the nearby wall.
However, the tube is partially covered by the cart, as if the artist intentionally wanted to conceal it, suggesting that the water dripping from the ceiling, once fallen, undergoes a metamorphosis, transforming into pink pebbles.

Therefore, there is no choice but to enter Piéron’s waiting room, allow oneself to be enveloped by the room’s atmosphere, and thus seek one’s own personal metamorphosis.

Benoît Piéron
The leak, 2023
Cleaning trolley, pump, PVC hose.
Exhibition view: “Benoît Piéron. Monstera deliciosa” at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, from October 26th 2023 to January 7th 2024.
Photo: Georg Petermichl / mumok.

Benoît Piéron, “The leak”, 2023, detail. Cleaning trolley, pump, PVC hose.
Exhibition view: “Benoît Piéron. Monstera deliciosa” at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, from October 26th 2023 to January 7th 2024.
Photo: Georg Petermichl / mumok.

17/01/2024