“I exist in a vaporous state. I am truly glitter in mid-air.” It is from this place of suspension that Benoît Piéron conceived Shadow Polish. Drawing on his experience of hospitals and living with illness, the French artist creates alternative representations of spaces, bodies and the emotions embedded in them. From hallucinatory waiting rooms and laundromats, to subdued emergency beacons glowing like nightlights and strobes filtering from beneath a hospital door, Benoît Piéron stretches familiar spaces through a practice of appropriation that blends sculpture and installation with techniques drawn from arts and crafts and DIY culture.

His works offer experiences of suspended time and reverie, replacing violence with gentleness and reintroducing desire and fantasy where they have been cast aside. Benoît Piéron recently discovered his own intersexuality: a variation in sex designation referring to a person born with sexual and hormonal characteristics that do not correspond to standard definitions of female or male bodies, a condition affecting 1.7% of the global population. This awareness has enriched the artist’s perspective on the political treatment of those whose lives deviate from the norm and extend beyond it.

Shadow Polish takes shape from this new realization. The exhibition presents itself as a setting of sparkling strangeness, a compass of disorientation where landmarks become blurred and the imagination creeps in. The artist unveils an abstract porn crip* film in the form of a shadow theater, whose shadows perform on a glass window. Various characters come together: mathematical tools, sextoys, sewing patterns as well as casts of the artist’s body intermingle in a glitchy and confused choreography.

Punctuated by uncertainty, the exhibition draws on the fluidity of boundaries and norms, reappropriating “projection”—that is, the fantasized way in which society relates to intersex bodies—as an aesthetic form. A series of street lamps accentuates this confusion, replacing their usual function of illumination with a spectacle of glitter—the kind used in nail art, a medium dear to the artist—that fuses into a luminous chromatic chaos where perception stretches and blurs. The glitter makes the bulbs shimmer, while the pigments blend until they become colorless, trading the desire to see, illuminate, and control everything for a spectacle of kaleidoscopic contemplation.

Shadow Polish filters light into unstable, expansive zones, becoming a scene where contours fluidify, where rhythms falter, and where time stretches and reverberates. Fixed systems are revealed to be nothing more than variations, truths mere fictions, as authority evaporates into glitter. Benoît Piéron explores the spectrum across which our genders, desires, and existences unfold, making impermanence his medium and placing it at the core of our identities.