Benjamin Bardou

France

Benjamin Bardou is a French artist specialized in the process of digital painting. His technique, derived from painting on glass, is used in special effects to recreate architectures and decorations superimposed on previously shot video images. In parallel with his work for the film industry, Benjamin Bardou develops an artistic research around urbanism. His interest in the the metropole manifested itself through the inspirations of classics such as the Metropolis films, Ghost in the Shell, the photographs of Berenice Abbott, or even the manga universe of Katsuhiro Otomo. But it was his arrival in Paris that transformed this attraction into a real fascination. Bardou goes in search of the soul of the city. At night, the multitude of streets and the lit windows of buildings are conducive to reverie and imagination. According to him, the form of the city marries that of the memory of places. He explores these different facets through several visual poems.


Bardou’s first video work in 2010, Paris, Capital of the 19th century, inspired by the book of the same name by Walter Benjamin, is a reflection on cinema as a technique enabling man to live in the new metropolises. Since 2018, the artist has been working on Megalopolis, a collection of visual poems, fragments of a megacity frozen by a dreamed interior vision, strolls in a future Paris inhabited by its past.


Benjamin_Bardou_Photogrammetry.jpg

Inferno

Inferno_Benjamin_Bardou_Photogrammetry.mp4

About the artwork


Wandering through Passage Verdeau in Paris.

"Everything must change for nothing to change." — The Cheetah, Luchino Visconti

Music: Within/Namiyoke Inari (Simon James French)

Voice: For Ever Mozart (Jean-Luc Godard)



About the series


“’These passages, a new invention of industrial luxury, are glass-covered galleries, panelled with marble, which cross entire blocks of buildings whose owners have grouped together for such considerations. On either side of these galleries, which receive the daylight from above, are lined up the most elegant stores, so that such a passage is a city, a world in miniature.’ — Illustrated Guide to Paris, 1850


In these covered galleries, countless food stores, restaurants, gadgets, souvenirs, by-products and ready-to-wear items punctuate the stroll of passer-bys. It is a labyrinth where the crowd as well as the merchandise are displayed. These commercial streets are neither completely outside nor completely inside the city. They act as thresholds, places of reverie where time and the consciousness of the flâneur are altered to counter the experience of the shock of the big city. Indeed, these streets, brought to life by iron and glass architecture, are above all a refuge from the inhospitable and blinding experience that is characteristic of megacities. The transformations brought about by modernity and the commercial sphere have reified the urban space. The inhabitants of the city no longer feel at home there; they are beginning to become aware of the inhumanity of the big city.


A threshold, buffer zone, dream zone; the passage is a place where several memories and states of consciousness are superimposed (dream, awakening, awareness). The voluntary memory, that of the chaos of commodity and publicity, rubs shoulders with the collective unconscious, the Ideal and the Utopia. The collective memory is a compound of truth and betrayal, of authentic utopia and phantasmagorical utopia, nurtured by the dream of the commodity. The architecture of the passage is the reification of this thought, and it is thus a testimony of the collective dream.


The passages would appear then as an antechamber of the collective awakening, where dialectic images show themselves in their double sense: on the one hand turned towards the myth and the archaic, the other turned towards the promise of social progress. The awakening of the collective appears then as a synthesis of a dreaming consciousness, and the antithesis of the awakened consciousness.


This artistic project, conceived as a triptych, has the task of presenting these different forms of memory that sway the crowds and circulate amongst the Parisian passages.”


Benjamin Bardou


Though these works can be collected individually, the series was designed as a triptych. The collector of the full triptych will receive an exclusive airdrop of an NFT by Benjamin Bardou. Applicable only once, to the first collector who acquires all three artworks.

technique

photogrammetry

format

landscape

duration

01:13

year

2022

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