Orly (Sud) / Works > 2008 ......
Presentation
Orly (Sud) is the title of a series of works inspired by the South Wing of Paris' Orly Airport.
Commenced in 2008, the first generation of paintings portrays a group of anonymous silhouettes evolving within the airport's interior volumes as well as its exterior spaces. The choreography of flight and unsteadiness imposed on these characters (who seem to intersect but without ever meeting each other), nurtures a feeling of disorientation and discomfort, in reference to the "Glorious Thirty" debacle, a three decades period in France which failed achieving its societal and technological ambitions, with disillusionment and economical upheavals as a result.
With the You Won't Forget Me painting (2011), the series evolves towards other paradigms : Orly (Sud) now stages the airport with some representative artists of the "Glorious Thirty" era (in this painting's case, musician Miles Davis and jazz singer Shirley Horn). Succeeding the first generation of paintings evoking the decay of the myth, the second series celebrates its magnificence by paying tribute to major artists of that time. The airport, previously envisioned as a symbol of a doomed social project, widens its vocation by seizing the totems of the time, and establishes a fusional relationship between the location and the stars populating its fantasized past, thus confirming and consolidating the airport's iconic status.
Works inspired by the Orly Airport's South Wing include as well a corpus of research on paper, dedicated to the Airport Control Tower.
Finally, a series of photographs of the South Building, taken during several location scouting conducted to document pictorial studies, is presented here as a complementary artistic testimony of existing paintings.
© Jacques Benoit. Design, works, photographies and texts by Jacques Benoit and under the author’s copyright. Except when derived from other sources and then mentioned as such.