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Highlight Gallery

May 3 - June 10, 2012

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17 Kearny Street San Francisco, CA 94104
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Backpages Backpages (2012)
Highlight Gallery is pleased to present Backpages, the first solo exhibition of Belgian artist Benoît Platéus in the United States. Working across a variety of media, Platéus’s works remain intentionally open to interpretation. Bringing together collage works, photographs, and sculptures in the vein of Duchamp’s “readymade,” the works in Backpages speak from the rough edges of torn images, and the residual traces of the photographic process. His two-dimensional works incorporate collage and drawing, pulling together images to create abstract patterns that signal the erosion of clarity. Platéus’s sculptural works in Backpages, made of urethane, are jugs that once contained the chemicals used in the darkroom—quasi-magical liquids that allow images to slowly emerge from blank pages. Paring down to the simplest possible form through these sculptures, Platéus poetically gestures towards images both concrete and latent—“all the images which could be/have been.” The exhibition Backpages is the inaugural show at Highlight’s new space at 17 Kearny Street in San Francisco’s downtown district. Using this new space as a satellite and expansion, Highlight continues its mission of bringing compelling emerging and mid-career artists into the fold of San Francisco’s art culture. Platéus has exhibited widely throughout Europe, with solo exhibitions at Galerie Baronian-Francey (Brussels), Galerie Aline Vidal (Paris), and S.M.A.K. (Gent, Belgium), as part of their “Kunst Nu” series focused on emerging artists. He has participated in group exhibitions including KARMA: Pop-Up Shop at 8 rue Saint-Bon (Paris) and White Flags (St. Louis); Famly Affairs at the Palais de Beaux-Arts (Brussels); and The State of Things. Brussels/Beijing, an exhibition organized by artists Luc Tuymans and Ai Weiwei about the art and artists of these two cities. His work is in the collection of the City Hall of Paris, The National Bank of Belgium, ING Collection, Embassy of Belgium in Tokyo, The National Contemporary Art Fund of France, as well as numerous other public and private collections in Belgium, France and the United States.