This contemporary art piece features a miniature snow globe containing a bar of yellow "Sunlight Soap" placed on a pastel-colored stand. The simple, almost monochromatic color palette of white, yellow, and soft pinks creates a visually striking and minimalist composition. The soap bar, with its bold text, serves as the focal point, drawing the viewer's attention to the everyday object encased in the glass sphere. The artwork's style and technique evoke a sense of nostalgia, while the juxtaposition of the common soap and the snow globe format suggests a commentary on the intersection of the mundane and the whimsical in modern life. ...
Benoît Piéron (b. Ivry-sur-Seine, 1983) was born with meningitis, and treated for leukaemia as a kid. In the 1970s and 1980s, 4,689 people with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders were infected with HIV and hepatitis viruses through the use of contaminated clotting factors – Piéron was one of these people, and whilst he did not become seropositive, his body became more political.
Four years ago, he returned to the hospital with a cancer. Upon reliving his childhood trauma, he realised that his works are intimately linked to his survival of HIV/AIDS. Through his practice, the guilt he experiences as one of a few survivors is transformed into something generative – a compostable energy that through practices of care and attention renews material detritus into forms that carry the voices, secretions and powers of others.
When his last cancer went into remission, he began assembling hospital-reformed sheets, with the help of a phenomenologist friend, materialised into toys, beach mats, flags, gymnastics ribbons, floor lamps and armchairs. The colours are softened by the intensive washing the sheets were subjected to. In spite of this hygienic treatment, "clean stains", the indelible traces of previous uses remain.
Piéron seeks to produce alternative expressions of the disease, instead exploring it as a site of potential. Far from the romantic heroism of the usual metaphors of illness, Piéron places himself in a grey and joyful zone. ...
