Bérénice Lefebvre

 

Bérénice Lefebvre visual artist's approach unfolds around different artistic fields such as multiple, sculpture and photography. This is part of a daily survey of urban space, territory from which we can observe a multiplication of frames and screens. All these surfaces, physical or pictorial, reflect a plurality of forms that constitute an important part of her formal repertoire, particularly those that can be extracted from certain networks of dense buildings, often located in peri-urban areas. From her perspective as a walker, however, it is impossible to perceive the city from the outset: it necessarily passes to the eyes of the screen status. She strives to reconstruct the contours of this urban territory by accumulating its representations, whether three-dimensional or planar, sculptures/images. She thus establishes a documentary corpus where each piece becomes an organ of a dislocated architectural body.

 

This omnipresence of the document as a source inscribes the work of Bérénice Lefebvre in this contemporary movement of art wich tends to look towards the archive.

 

In the same way, through her collages and her manipulations, Bérénice Lefebvre asserts her subjective choice and shakes the authority of the archive. Through reconstructions, her works created new frames and new screens on which cling our respective imaginations. From one fragment to another, there is the question of a future in suspense, a dynamic expectation generated by the impulse of a changing urban territory.

 

Insatiable walker in search of modern architectures, Bérénice Lefebvre tirelessly explores the urban peripheries armed with her digital camera. Throughout the streets, she brings together a whole body of black and white clichés that represent, first and foremost, the study of a given territory. This physical experience of the walk leaves indeed personal cartography of the space. But once in the studio, these images become material in their own right, the subject of multiple mechanical manipulations and photosensitive experiments. Bérénice Lefebvre triturates, reproduces, isolates a detail, cut, size, frame and reframes photoshop these images gleaned over these wanderings. These pieces of architecture, these fragments of buildings, these textures and these volumes become the cement of the fictional environments of the artist. Empty of any human presence, its large format photomontages are in the form of immense rolls suspended on the walls, or in the form of adhesives glued on the glass walls, but also in the form of editions. Through these assemblages of sprawling architectural bodies that make us lose all reference, another landscape escaping the unusual perspectives appears to us. Through her works that always favor the context for which they are conceived, this young artist nourished by the writings of Rem Koolhaas sees architecture as a living organism and wonders about the city, its mutations, its development, its expansion. "