Les Rencontres d'Arles Rencontres d'Arles: expositions, stages photo /exhibitions, photo workshops.

His goal? Coming to terms with reality as one looks at a painting, and capturing shapelessness – nothing but colour, light, values and structures for their own sake. His sole concern is their aesthetic obviousness and their poetry, which compel us to simply stop and look, and then to try and steal the fleeting emotion before it is lost.

To do so, a first-generation digital camera with its limitations; a camera whose noise is like the touch or trace of a brush, rendering colour that is limpid or saturated like repentance. Such is the intention behind this photographic work.

But can we really talk of Jean-Marie Bénézet’s ‘work’? ‘Working’ implies crafting a material, asserting one’s will in and against things. Any work has a Promethean quality: humankind acts against things, bending them to satisfy its wishes.

I put it to you that Jean-Marie Bénézet – who confesses without irony that he cannot paint – does not work. How so? Nothing he does surpasses or transfigures the world with the purpose of leaving his mark.

Alain Guyard

Jean-Marie Bénézet

Born in 1954 in Gallician. Lives in Le Cailar (France).

After working as a professional photographer from the late 1970’s to the mid-1980’s, in situations as diverse as ethnographic museums and weddings, Bénézet gave up the discipline for many years in order to devote himself to art: looking at and choosing works; designing and setting up exhibitions; and dealing with commissions.

This mix of questing, curiosity and concern left no room for personal practice. Perhaps a certain time has to pass before one dares to take the artistic plunge; here it happened almost in spite of Bénézet himself, when he bought the digital camera he needed for his work in an art centre.

Taking the camera with him on his travels and occasionally on his daily walks, he was surprised to catch himself photographing whatever caught his eye – and to find that the results made up an oeuvre. His first exhibition came at the suggestion of painter Christian Astor in the spring of 2007.

EXHIBITIONS