Meessen is delighted to present Coriums, Benoit Platéus’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.
Comprising a series of new paintings, the exhibition’s title, Coriums, carries a dual meaning. On one hand, from its Latin origin, it refers to the dermis—the skin’s inner layer—invoking ideas of depth and texture. On the other hand, in English (from core), corium describes a magma of molten and mixed fuels within the heart of a nuclear reactor, a substance that can form in the aftermath of a nuclear meltdown. With this layered title—purposefully plural—we see Platéus’s fascination with both the “skin” of painting, encompassing its surface and ornamentation, and the underlying elements that constitute it: background, pigments, and complex colour blends.

The title provides an ideal lens through which to engage with Platéus’s work, inviting us into a space that suggests both surface and depth, mystery and enigma. Paul Valéry beautifully praised the mystery in Stéphane Mallarmé’s language, observing how it requires time to enter, with initial readings that feel resistant, even hermetic. Similarly, Platéus’s paintings call for an infusion of time. His approach diverges from contemporary painting trends that are often defined by immediacy and instant impact. There is no overt narrative in Platéus’s work—yet there is an intricate form of writing. Across the surface of the large canvases, arabesques, sketched shapes, and traces of hand movements seem drawn, or rather “written.” This is writing that resists easy deciphering, enticing the viewer to linger, to delve deeper, to notice each shadow, recess, silhouette, and whisper.

Drawing as writing, or writing as drawing? Here, interpretation remains wide open.

In this body of work, we find backgrounds that feel rooted in elemental forces—sometimes evoking molten lava, at other times the depths of ocean or sky—over which a singular, wandering form of writing freely drifts. The backgrounds appear to have fermented slowly over time in the studio, while the writing feels spontaneous, direct, almost seizure-like in its intensity. Smaller pieces, painted on raw canvas, arise from a different impulse: oranges, figs. In their unadorned simplicity and presentation to the world, these fruits are stripped of the superfluous. These small paintings by Platéus carry the intimacy and distilled beauty of a haiku.

With Coriums, Platéus reveals a form of painting imbued with breaths and syncopations, with catastrophes and rebirths, with vaporous haze and moments of repentance. This is a mature body of work, still animated by an underlying youthful vitality.

As we take in these recent works, one senses: the graft has taken hold.