On Saturday 21st February 2009 at 6,30pm, Furini Arte Contemporanea in Arezzo will inaugurate ‘Swimming blue’, Benoît Pailley’s first Italian one-man show.

On a perfect sunny day a huge tarpaulin, hung to protect and screen a building under construction, comes partly loose from its support and is lifted by the wind. A fairly nondescript event in itself that might leave one totally indifferent, apart from the problem it creates for the site workers who have to attach it again. For Benoît Pailley, however, it is something more than a minor inconvenience on a building site: there is an implied, metaphoric meaning, an aesthetic quality that becomes the allegory for an existential hypothesis. The French artist decides to capture the moment, halting the movement by taking photos from below looking up, and to record the flapping motion with a digital video camera. The result is the installation Swimming blue, created specifically for the gallery, in which a series of images of the tarpaulin, all of them different, accompanies the viewer towards the heart of the exhibition, where the static nature of the photos is exchanged for two video projections in different formats.

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