The gallery is delighted to welcome Benoît to the program of the gallery! It is a great honor to present his first solo exhibition maps, cutouts, and others sunburns in Cologne, showing new paintings in small, medium and large scale.
The central components of Benoit’s works are coincidence and imperfection. His painting, which at times appears fragile, minimal and at the same time in love with detail, reflects and provokes the unforeseeable, even if the starting point of his paintings can often be existing image sources of a very different nature. These visual inspirations include for example book or picture excerpts, historical paintings, prints, tattoos or natural phenomena.
It is important to him that his composition does not appear to follow an obvious pattern. He is always looking for the reverse, the reversed, the contradictory, the hidden, the echo. Flowers appear like skeletons, brush marks like shadowy little shadow patterns; he mostly only hints, his paintings rarely become too concrete. It is believed that punched tape patterns, brain twists, X-ray images, textile fabrics, traces of rust or shapes of cave paintings are transformed in abstract landscapes and create interwoven worlds of imagination.
Benoit usually starts working with his canvases creating different layers of paint, which are often erased and washed out again, so that the backgrounds of the work appear kind of faded. Patterns, grids or organic formations complement each other like a collage: small paper elements torn out by hand are painted and glued into the canvas compositions. They appear like foreign bodies or science fiction images, sometimes similar to meteorites, sometimes like flower heads or leaves, always walking between worlds.
