Charneux & Tejero

Baptiste Charneux & Benjamin Tejero

Overflows

The works of Baptiste Charneux and Benjamin Tejer, combined in Overflows, seem to try to capture the impression of water. If the title suggests abundance, water is in fact scarce: whether latent, just before pouring, evaporating or even stagnating. Water is certainly present, but it does not flow, and yet it is this flow that underlies the artists' entire exhibition.The excess of overflow is not translated in terms of quantity, but in terms of water, with its core infinite capacity to define. In this way, the artists push their viewer from one bank to the other along a luminous river.

According to the poet Francis Ponge, water is that which always tries to go lower, that which never stops looking for the lowest place, lowers itself. Water is also the subterranean, chthonic, current that generates inflection and slippage: the oblique gaze etched in glass by Benjamin, the scopic urge of the eye that searches inside a vessel and finds in the work of Baptista a tautology of two stacked bundles, or ceramics with polished edges.

We wash where we get dirty (the bathroom), we relax where we stew (the steam room), we enhance functional furniture with magnificent accessories (bathroom furniture). The subtle and narcissistic violence of our relationship to our image is captured by Benjamin and Baptiste, who rewrite it using materials that are both precise and vulnerable, original and sophisticated.

Overflow indicates a breach, and water (apart from its tendency to run downhill) is indeed characterized by its power of intrusion: from food extraction to water droplet erosion.

"Overflow" is a waterway anomaly; a challenge to measure and dry. The impossibility of containment (and the subsequent spilling over) connects the work Benjamin and Baptista created together. To contain implies a solid, definitive form, even though the clay vessels were not fired.

As for the screens, they are engraved with elaborate patterns that suggest eroticism or the organic nature of hair pressed against glass.

From the motif of water and the swimming pool, which is present in the exhibition, the motif of the body stands out, the temptation to form one body, depicting a roundness that refuses to "be an object" in order to merge with the surrounding space, respectively depicting seduction and the simultaneously perfect and imperfect nature of the encounter with oneself and with the other.