signs and symbols

Benoît Platéus: Other Percolators  

January 6 - February 11, 2023        

Opening Reception:
January 6, 2023
6:00 - 8:00pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present Other Percolators, Belgian artist Benoît Platéus's second solo exhibition at the gallery. Long fascinated by found objects and the transmutation of images across mediums, Platéus selected the disparate subjects of his new series of paintings — abandoned tools and toys, a fallen pizza slice, natural landscapes — from photographs taken in the streets or encountered online.

For this new body of work, Platéus works with a collection of found images as his starting point, images of curious and seemingly unusual situations. Exploring the potential for representational forms to materialize new realities, he is attracted to the unexpected moments and circumstances that appear to be accidents or oddities, strange images that make one question, “what is this, what is going on here?” There is always a surprise and an uncertainty, whether it is unclear what an image really is or perhaps images that are viewable from different vantage points. The artist has long been interested in the fluid nature of the image — a sticker on a glass storefront of a deli appears different depending on the perspective, looking out from the inside of the shop vs. looking inside from outside of the glass. For Platéus, these viewpoints create different layers to the same image, as he keeps these multiple perspectives and positions in his abstracted paintings. As Platéus explains, “When painting, I try to bring in different types of images and vantage points into the way an image is painted, there are always 3 or 4 images in one painting. I like the paintings to be ‘open’ — not to refer to one specific image but many. I think about a painting as a connector, like free association.” For example, in the painting entitled Hieroglyph Machine, Platéus started with the photo of a sewing machine (he loves them), but as a painting it brings together the machine itself, a printed circuit board and also something that could recall ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

These pensive layered paintings are open to interpretation; the viewer will see what they want to see. Cleansing our palettes of figuration, Platéus's abstracted paintings act as puzzles to be untangled, and his humorous titles perform as clues in the decoding process: Italian Geometry, Galactic Stick, Electric Flowers. Platéus notes, “I like this percolating thing — a liquid that slowly passes through different layers — the painting as a percolator is not the result of the process but the process itself.” To percolate is to trickle through something porous; to spread; to be filtered; to be strained into an essence. Thus Platéus's paintings act as percolators themselves, interpreting an object and sifting its forms and colors through the canvas, until the ultimate image is revealed.

benoît platéus was born in 1972 in Liège, Belgium and currently lives and works in Brussels. In his work, he investigates and plays with the spaces and relationships between mediums, exploring abstraction in form and content. His work has been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mu.ZEE, Ostend; Karma, New York; Almine Rech, London; Meessen De Clercq, Brussels; CentreWallonieBruxelles (CWB), Paris; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Galerie Albert Baronian, Brussels; Annarumma Gallery, Naples; and Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Paris, among others. He is included in several museum collections around the world, including the Fond National d’Art Contemporain, France and the Musée d’Ixelles, Belgium. In 2019, he was the subject of a mid-career retrospective One Inch Off at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, which was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog and later traveled to Bonner Kunstverein in Germany.