Benjamin Hochart

Benjamin Hochart was born in 1982, he lives and works in Aubervilliers and Paris (FR)

“My artistic practice is a struggle — a fight with or against materials — that resolves in the appearance of the sculpture.
I begin creating forms in volume only after having thought about them extensively, mentally turning them around from every angle, then drawing them. During these preparatory drawings, I pay no attention to the technical, physical, or chemical properties of the materials I intend to use later. I throw out ideas, and I often let myself get caught by the form of the drawing itself — by the line, by the contemplation of the shape taking form on paper.
When I begin working in the studio, I have a very precise idea of what the sculpture will be — I have its drawing, almost like a map — but this is only a direction. And so I begin to draw again, this time with the materials. I wrestle with them — and of course, I lose. Then I dismantle, destroy, and reconstruct something else on top of a piece I’ve kept — a structure or element from which it all began. The sculpture will not be exactly what I had imagined, drawn, or conceived; it will attempt to become both what I desire and what the studio labor imposes.

This is how my sculpture is shaped by both the idea (because I don’t believe that purely formal research is enough to make a complex piece; that would be just a collage of materials and shapes — a kind of fascination, nothing more) and the studio work (because, similarly, one can’t cling stupidly to their ideas, sketches, or fantasies — at some point, you have to play with the accident or chance of the studio. Sculpture, for me, is always a trace of past struggle — the fight between a human and matter).
The works accumulate in such a way as to construct a world where the hypothesis of what normally cannot be or exist becomes possible.

How to explode forms and, in doing so, explode meaning?
How can a recognizable and identifiable sculpture, made with specific material choices and gestures, be the most potential — a receptacle for a multitude of evocations, images, and references — while also remaining, for all viewers, something precise and inflexible, implacable in its meaning, authoritative or monumental, historical, as Sculpture is — and must be?

Thus, it matters to me that what I present can always be viewed through the lenses of multiple disciplines: architecture, anthropology, anatomy, history, geography… that all these fields be engaged, so that they complicate interpretation — so that the work is no longer just what it is, but becomes something other, a potential for alterity.

Potential — this word, a leitmotif of my work, comes from an encounter: the encounter with a phrase in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities: ‘If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.’

It then became clear to me that what is real is no more enviable or justifiable than what is possible.
It became clear that the things we see can only be what we want them to be — that what we believe is merely the result of hypotheses or beliefs elevated to the rank of science or authority. It’s up to us to dethrone them — or invent new ones.”

— Benjamin Hochart