Benjamin Bichard: EXTRA ORDINAIRE

Rethinking the Ordinary by Benjamin Bichard

Who is Benjamin Bichard?

Benjamin Bichard is a French artist born in 1982 in Nice and graduated from Villa Arson in 2010. Living between Paris and Nice, he develops an installation-based practice using everyday objects that he transforms through assembly, accumulation, and diversion.

His work highlights the formal and sensitive dimension of ordinary materials while questioning our relationship to consumption and the fragility of things. Notably recognized at the Salon de Montrouge in 2012, he held his first solo exhibition in 2015 at Galerie Géraldine Banier. Subsequently, he has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and residencies, continuing his research around space and perception. In 2024, a solo exhibition at Le Narcissio in Nice brought together objects and drawings within the same immersive installation.

We are now eagerly awaiting his next exhibition, EXTRA ORDINAIRE, which will take place from June 5 to July 4, 2026, at La Maison Abandonnée Villa Cameline in Nice.

Benjamin Bichard’s renewed reading

Re-appropriation is at the center of Benjamin Bichard’s work. Through this approach, he gives a second life firstly, one could even say a new destiny, to objects considered forgotten. He transforms and sculpts them into colorful and airy installations. Rendered invisible through habit, diverted from their original function, these everyday elements create a renewed reading. Consequently, the viewer is invited to deconstruct their perception of the familiar and enter a new reality.

Accumulation and repetition of identical objects are central to Benjamin Bichard’s work. Arman follows a similar thread through mass accumulation and saturation, creating an almost industrial sense of profusion. Bichard, however, interprets objects through a far more plastic and experimental approach, exploring their form, fragility, and presence within space. In doing so, he questions our relationship to consumption, materiality, and the overload of the contemporary world. No longer isolated, the object becomes a collective material that occupies space and transforms the viewer’s perception. Marked by the culture of disposability, his work rejects planned obsolescence.

An encounter between oblivion and metamorphosis

The strength of his installations lies in their ability to sublimate trivial materials and elevate them to the status of artworks. While offering a sensitive reflection on our relationship to objects. Colored pencils become a bench resembling coral, though it is only visually a bench, since the sharpened tips pointing upward discourage anyone from sitting on it. The object seems to look back at us and compels us to do the same. Through its presence, it almost becomes unsettling in what it might be capable of. The object here, the pencil frees itself from its functional theology and regains an existence of its own. Then, it no longer belongs to the realm of design, as it is no longer conceived for human comfort.

Benjamin Bichard creates a singular encounter between oblivion and metamorphosis.
This metamorphosis possesses something deeply organic. His creations resemble new forms of life with their own autonomy. Drawing from familiar visual codes, moss, for example, is rendered red or bright yellow. He even goes so far as to recreate a bunch of grapes that only retain the appearance of fruit. Refusing the condition for which they were intended, its stem and grapes are in fact hair clips.

Reshaping the spaces

These objects lose their identity as future waste to become works of art.
Benjamin Bichard does not rescue these objects from the trash, nor does he recover them at the end of their lifespan after use has exhausted them. He intervenes beforehand, at the moment they leave the factory. On the threshold of ordinary life, precisely when the object is about to enter the world and fulfill the purpose for which it was designed. The symbolic death of the object is intrinsic to its creation. Benjamin Bichard reverses this verdict. His work begins where their function ceases to exist, at the threshold of utility.

The objects transformed by Benjamin Bichard ultimately reshape the spaces they inhabit. The time of an exhibition, they imbue these places with the feeling of being inhabited not by human presence, but by silent forms of existence. His work suggests that the end of an object’s function is not an ending. It is the beginning of another possible life, one that still escapes clear definition.

EXTRA ORDINAIRE 

Through his installations, Benjamin Bichard invites us to reconsider the status of ordinary objects and the invisible systems that shape our daily environment. So by disrupting their intended function and revealing their poetic, fragile, and sometimes unsettling presence. Bichard transforms the familiar into something uncertain and alive. EXTRA ORDINAIRE extends this reflection, offering viewers an immersive experience where matter, space, and perception continually shift. Opening the possibility for a new way of looking at the world around us. Thus, this is precisely why you should experience the exhibition in person. To fully encounter the physical presence of the works and the unique atmosphere they create within the space.

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