Benoît Piéron
Peluche Psychopompe XIII
2022
Patchwork doll made of repurposed hospital sheets
20 x 43 x 8.5 cm
Acquisition date: 2023

Born in 1983 in Ivry-sur-Seine (France), Benoît Piéron makes art that is largely forged by a lifelong experience with and alongside illness. Living with meningitis and leukemia since birth, the artist was among the unsuspecting victims of a major French health scandal, being transfused with HIV-infected blood during a hospital stay. Although he was never HIV-positive, this early childhood experience informed his personal identity as part of “the people of the hospital.” After surviving another disease in 2019, Piéron realized that he should center his art on making sense of survival, ensuring that the voice of the deceased is heard, and sharing his experience of being ill and surviving so as not to feel guilty for being alive.

Peluche Psychopompe XIII is a plush bat made of repurposed hospital sheets. A recurring protagonist in Piéron’s work, the flying mammal enjoys an ambivalent position in it, due to its being able to live both inside and outside of society and its being cute and touching but, at the same time, evoking death and its realm. A case in point, the pastel hues of Peluche Psychopompe XIII give the bat a “soft and desirable” air, although it nevertheless hints at the presence of the deceased, the corpses that the sheets used to cover – a materialization of the artist’s conscious attempt to reconcile viewers with illness and death.