The life of Benoit Vieubled, your lighting designer in Biscarrosse

Throughout his career, Benoît Vieubled remains a painter. This is evident in his penchant for drawing, which is the origin of an ongoing series of faces, animals, and nudes subtly reflected on the wall behind the lamp, giving the impression of a kind of self-writing, as if escaping from a mirror.

More generally, much like a painter composes a canvas, the artist stages and arranges the elements of the object, striving to both surprise and suspend, to create counterpoints, to play with the language of chandeliers through inversion or accumulation. He seeks lines and constantly engages with the material. A free-spirited creator since 1997, after studying at the Institute of Visual Arts in Orléans and having taught painting himself, his art (particularly his lighting fixtures) is deliberately hybrid, somewhere between installation, artist's pieces, design, and fine craftsmanship. His luminous world maps, “World Right Side Up – World Upside Down,” themselves take us on a journey around the globe.

When you enter his showroom, Ex Nihilo, where he permanently exhibits his work, and then, after a stroll through the Italian-style courtyard, into his studio, you are immediately struck by a sense of abundance, a teeming abundance of ideas. There's something of an explorer about this man, but one who brings back treasures primarily from his imagination, the very imagination that has defined his uniqueness since childhood. Objects from elsewhere, traces of truly distant travels, abound: wood from Mali, gold leaf from Burma, demonstrating his desire to bring back from each country an element of a grand puzzle, where each piece must find its way into another, through the will to the unexpected.

benoit vieubled

Seeing so many of Benoît Vieubled's works in a single room, one might be tempted to use the expression "cabinet of curiosities," and it's true that a series resulting from a commission employs such conventions. But when the gaze settles on each piece individually, suddenly setting aside the profusion, we understand that these works possess, in their twists and turns of thought and materials, a true coherence, with, paradoxically within this abundance, a profound quest for simplicity.

It is here that Benoît Vieubled's art appears in its foundations and its singularity: lightness, fragility, transparency. Even everyday objects are suddenly defined by these three words: for example, a glass tree becomes a chandelier. On a box of mirrors or an egg, the artist writes: "I am fragile," and he places these objects at random in the streets, including his own, the very popular Rue des Carmes in Orléans.

In this latest creation for Adler Jewelers, who have professed "the cult of beauty" since their inception, beauty is indeed present. Art becomes a butterfly garden, open to the air, measured by a twig with golden reflections and the beating of wings. Lightness and fragility are also conveyed through the work with wire, a way of drawing in space, this ever-reinvented principle of the mobile. Symbolically inspired by the gestures of a jeweler, the chiseled hand hammers, patinates, and assembles metal and brilliance.

Here, the crystal's movement is a recurring theme in Benoît Vieubled's work: the lighting must become a stage setting. It is about capturing it from the inside out, from the outside in.

The Creator often uses noble materials, but left in their raw state, and at other times, a slate, a piece of driftwood which, for their part, go from simple to elaborate.

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And also, it often needs to clink, to instill an immediate return to the senses, with this lingering sense of fragility, combined with a meditative joy. Thus, these pieces of silverware, which the artist has transformed into a school of fish with a pleasing sound, are a memory that springs from his stays at Pointe du Raz in Brittany. Of course, during this suspended moment, everyone might think of Calder, whom he admires, but his inspiration as a painter also leads us to the great master of the timeless, of the spare line, Matisse, or, closer to our time, to Miguel Barceló. And, for him, there is also his constant homage to Paul Klee's unparalleled lesson on composition.

If his art touches us so deeply, it is because, in a way, his works are poems. With their touch of childhood. From those formative years, there is the importance of play, the pleasure of touch, mischief, a taste for building and deconstructing, and a habit of setting no limits or adhering to dogma. These sources extend to a lifelong interest in ethnology, the novels of Joseph Conrad, the habit of tracing world maps to imagine immediate journeys, the game of melting candles to better understand the flame, observing his mother, a skilled seamstress, and his grandfather's metalworking shop where, alone in this almost forgotten place, he could practice his skills, articulate objects, and bring together what seemed incongruous before the magic happened—or not. A famous series centered around a rat, a bestiary, and a circus seems to spring directly from this wandering imagination. As a child, Benoît Vieubled was a dancer who appeared as an extra in a Roland Petit ballet, and he had fun portraying Zizi (the choreographer's muse, the famous Zizi Jeanmaire) as a dizzying mouse.

In recent years, his work has also taken a more politically engaged turn, notably with this impressive boat covered in luminous globes, which can be seen at both the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans and UNESCO, a metaphor for the migrants' journey. This message is intended to be universal, the boat deliberately remaining unidentifiable. The globes themselves are displaced, from different eras, without any defined order, because geopolitics, too, is changing. This major work remains in the shadows, bathed in a cold tone, like those crossings so often nocturnal and icy.

What do we do with our inner landscapes? Do we let them be swept away by a mist that will turn vapor into a future oblivion? Slowly, Benoît Vieubled has chosen instead to map them.

He explores duration (through the retrieval of objects) and the instant (the moment when the idea sparks, when the trace begins its metamorphosis). Most of the works evoke an upward movement and thus prompt us to question the Earth's gravity. With the spirit of fables, the artist invites us to approach the improbable, to become, for the duration of a glance, tightrope walkers ourselves.

Here, shadows are collected as readily as rays of light and glimmers. This very slow studio process is meant to speak to us of the natural in the final result: though made of porcelain, the butterfly seems to truly flutter.

From his studio to the world, from an inner landscape to the most tangible reality, Benoît Vieubled, a tireless explorer of forms and materials, always takes on the challenge of surprising us and invites us here on a new journey toward transparency.

Carl Norac

A light artist in Biscarrosse

Contact

Address

Atelier :
240 Chemin de Chicoutas, 40600 Biscarrosse
Boutique/Galerie :
Les Hangars (Saint-Michel), 22 rue des Allamandiers, 33800 Bordeaux Rencontre avec le créateur sur rendez-vous

Phone

06 81 13 54 54

Email

atelier.bvieubled@wanadoo.fr
Boutique/Galerie
Lundi et Mardi : Fermé Mercredi au Samedi : 10h30 - 18h00 Dimanche : 08h30 - 14h00

Benoît Vieubled

240 Chemin de Chicoutas 40600, Biscarrosse
06 81 13 54 54