Exploring immanence and its possibilities, revealing a presence, bringing a reality to light... Entirely based on this philosophical principle, Benjamin Ottoz’s artistic process tends to reveal forms inherent in the medium itself, to make the invisible present, offer to the viewer what he could not see.

Benjamin Ottoz’s plastic researches come from Serendi-pidy. When a day spray paint accidentally touchdown on a piece of crumpled paper, he discovers a new potentiality for this medium. Once crumpled, folded, pressed, tested, paper offers unsuspected, intriguing and captivating forms and volumes. With a well-established protocol including extreme handling of the paper, its painting and flattening, Benjamin Ottoz develops a contemplative poetry of this medium. For the artist, the work is a revelation of what was inside the object, specific to its plasticity, like a photograph capturing what could not perceive by eye. Neither photography, nor painting, nor sculpture, this work is all of these at once.

The volume gained by the paper places it in an in-between, a form of second and half dimension, neither two-dimensional nor completely three-dimensional. Essential for creating this state and these forms, Benjamin Ottoz’s manipulations reveal the inherent potential of this object and manifest a poetry of immanence.

This artistic research has led the artist to other supports, rock surfaces whose texture, roughness and variations tell a story revealed by Benjamin Ottoz’s intervention. Once the paint applied on the rock reveals its poetic potential with its fine, pure and abstract creating a play of chiaroscuro by capturing the light here and there, like a twilight landscape. An artistic gesture which joins the other poetic revelations of Benjamin Ottoz...

 

Thibaut Wauthion