Benjamin Bardou is a matte painter, that is to say a specialist in the process of digital painting. This technique, derived from painting on glass, is used in special effects to recreate architectures and decorations superimposed on previously shot video images. In parallel with his work for the film industry, Benjamin Bardou develops an artistic research around urbanism. His interest in the the metropole manifested itself through the inspirations of classics such as the Metropolis films, Ghost in the Shell, the photographs of Berenice Abbott, or even the manga universe of Katsuhiro Otomo. But it was his arrival in Paris that transformed this attraction into a real fascination. Bardou goes in search of the soul of the city. At night, the multitude of streets and the lit windows of buildings are conducive to reverie and imagination. According to him, the form of the city marries that of the memory of places. He explores these different facets through several visual poems.

Bardou’s first video work in 2010, Paris, Capital of the 19th century, inspired by the book of the same name by Walter Benjamin, is a reflection on cinema as a technique enabling man to live in the new metropolises. Since 2018, the artist has been working on Megalopolis, a collection of visual poems, fragments of a megacity frozen by a dreamed interior vision, strolls in a future Paris inhabited by its past.