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