Pacific Breeze II

 Graphic artist Lau­rent Ben­ner, cur­rently based in Lon­don, com­bines two pas­sions: graphic art and music. The cov­ers he de­signs for the min­i­mal/am­bi­ent label Dreck Records, of which he is a found­ing mem­ber, deftly vi­su­al­ize sounds in ab­stract pat­terns. For the club se­ries 'Dis­coam­bu­lante' and 'Ritmo', Ben­ner sim­u­lates the sound in a di­ver­sity of ag­i­tated type­faces: the al­most vi­brat­ing let­ter­ing of 'Sound Stream' is seen against the back­ground of styl­ized, pop­ping soap bub­bles, while the zigzag­ging let­ters of 'Sec­ondo' seem to be suf­fer­ing from elec­troshock. This fun-lov­ing vi­su­al­iza­tion is rem­i­nis­cent of comics and car­toons. Ben­ner also ex­ploits odd retro de­vices in his use of found ma­te­ri­als, such as an in­vi­ta­tion that pic­tures a woman of the 1980s with care­fully blow-dried hair and wear­ing a pink dress, or a soc­cer player in a gym suit and sport­ing a bouf­fant bun­dle of curly hair. These em­bed­ded im­ages are clearly leg­i­ble as ap­pro­pri­a­tions in con­trast to the un­mis­tak­ably con­tem­po­rary graph­ics. As a book de­signer, Ben­ner has done cat­a­logues for artists like Gary Hume and Chris­t­ian Mar­clay, with whom he shares his pas­sion for music. Ben­ner's work is richly var­ied and shows great at­ten­tion to even the small­est de­tails. In one of his con­cep­tual works, he fo­cused on a ma­te­r­ial. For his edi­tion of posters 'XYZ by Night', he col­lected joke post­cards from the 1980s: 18 post­cards from 18 hol­i­day des­ti­na­tions, all of which pre­sent a night-time view of the lo­ca­tion that is just a plain black post­card. The hack­neyed joke be­comes even more ab­surd by pre­sent­ing all of the post­cards at once. Lau­rent Ben­ner has re­ceived many prizes for his work, in­clud­ing 'IN­FORM: Preis für konzep­tionelles Gestal­ten' (Leipzig, 2007) and the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Award (2001, 2004). In ad­di­tion, be­tween 2004 and 2006, he de­signed Die schönsten Schweizer Bücher, the pub­li­ca­tion for the most beau­ti­ful Swiss books, pub­lished by the Fed­eral Of­fice of Cul­ture.

Ref: Peter Stohler
www.schweizerkulturpreise.ch