Combining the practices of wood engraving, drawing and installation, Elise Benard offers answers to the following endlessly renewed question: which shape can we give to the experience of time?
She explores the possibilities of wood, finding within this living fibre both the subject and the medium of her pieces. The materials’ resistance and the repeated gestures that are necessary to the reproduction stages of a print, become involved as the various traces and imprints of a multiplied reality. Being a more instantaneous medium, drawing expresses the fragility and fleetingness of the moment. The dialogues that are created by the rearranging of manufactured elements and original images interrogate the role of our gaze and its perpetual movement. The artist embraces the suggestive potential of places, recovered objects; she composes synthesised forms or plastic precipitates that are confronted with sound or video tapes.
Thus, in revisiting paramount visual signs (natural and housing landscapes), Elise Benard underlines the various strata and the different states of matter and its renewal. She poetically bears witness to the everyday and subjective layer of time, revealing the sometimes invisible ties that it provokes between elements, bodies, and generations.