reviews emilie benoist
Cellula Phantastica, 2007
(installation view).
© Galerie evaHober, Paris
emilie Benoist:
CellulA PhAntAstiCA
Galerie evaHober, Paris
8 sePtem ber – 13 october
In the medieval medical topology of the scholastic tradition, the cellula By far the most ambitious and impressive work to date by this 37-year-
phantastica, located just inside the forehead and tethered to the optic old Parisian artist, Cellula Phantastica (2007) overshadows the other pieces
nerves at the point where they chiasmically intersect with one another, in the show – eight feverish pencil drawings (Sous la Surface, 1998–2007),
is the cerebral chamber in which sensory data is fashioned into luminous some with Hindu imagery and mandala-like motifs, some with meandering
visions – ‘visual spirits’ – that are then pushed out to the retinas and at the scribblings or delicate splashes of colour, and all ostensibly depicting brain
same time etched onto the inner surface of the mind. The source of dreams activity during waking dreams; and a vitrine of brainlike clusters of found
and seat of the imagination, the cellula phantastica has captured the fancy materials, garishly coloured and hanging from spidery threads of yarn. This
of many artists since the Middle Ages – William Blake called it the ‘furnace last piece, like some of the more abstract drawings, call to mind Eva Hesse’s
of Los’ and believed that its sensory messages were conveyed by larks. work, sharing its aesthetic preoccupation with modern industry’s brittle
Emilie Benoist’s sculptural version is no less fabulous: a monumental discards. With Cellula Phantastica, however, Benoist has created something
proliferation of Indian temple towers (the work was conceived during the entirely her own. By incorporating new materials and techniques, the work
artist’s residency in Pondicherry in early 2007) frothed with greenish-blue expands the field for what she defines as her ‘poetic recuperation’, and in
synthetic balls of varying degrees of tininess, as if awash in sweet peas, the process provides a more mature and compelling vocabulary for her
sea spray and mouldering spittle. Attached to its back end and stretching cerebral obsessions. Barely fitting into the small gallery space yet seething
the length of the cramped gallery space is a spinal column constructed with details, both colossal and of an intimate-enough scale to be wholly
from what looks like sanded and smoothed driftwood, ghostly pale and apprehended within a single once-over of the eye, it sublimely confounds,
intersected every few inches by straight and curving branches. Some of delights and repulses, filling the mind, as Addison famously said of the
the branches grow out of the central trunk, but most have been slotted into Alps, with an ‘agreeable kind of horror’. You want to stroke the smoothed
it through bored holes, creating a bizarre arboreal structure that gracefully wood, but God forbid you should touch, or be touched, by the mouldering
tapers to an end near the back wall. The effect is delicate and sensual, spittle. Christopher Mooney
a ventral cord and cranial stem at once animal, mineral and vegetable,
architectural and organic, utopian and metamorphic, representational
and abstract.
199 Artreview
November_REVIEWS.indd 199 26/9/07 13:36:56
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