Carole Benzaken : Rien de nouveau sous le soleil

Since 2023, Le Mans museums have been developing a program dedicated to contemporary creation, in echo with their permanent collections. Rien de nouveau sous le soleil, a monographic exhibition by Carole Benzaken, is part of this approach, taking as its starting point Philippe de Champaigne's famous Vanité, kept at the Musée de Tessé.

 

Since the 1990s, Carole Benzaken has been developing a body of work deeply rooted in a reflection on time, the unfinished, and the status of images, where the question of vanity in painting is underlying. From the Tulips series, which brought her to the attention of the general public during her exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in 1994, to her latest paintings recently shown at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the artist explores a variety of pictorial worlds that reflect an aesthetic of the ephemeral and impermanent.

Placed alongside Philippe de Champaigne's Vanité, the exhibition reveals the many ways in which Carole Benzaken approaches the passage of time and the question of movement. Through a selection of works in various media, the exhibition will combine her large-format works with her miniature images, and the bright colors of her palette with the intense blacks and whites of her drawings, prints, and backlit boxes. Blurred, diffracted, and layered, her works compose a unique visual grammar, opposed to the uniform and insignificant images of everyday life. Plants, a recurring motif, embody a cyclical, slow, and meditative temporality, counterpointing a world caught up in speed.

The exhibition occupies the entire first floor of the museum and offers an immersive journey into the world of Carole Benzaken. Visitors will discover different aspects of the artist's protean and sensitive work, accompanied by the backlit drawings on tracing paper Candide, a visual chronicle begun in 2003 capturing ephemeral images destined to be forgotten. Accepting the human condition with joy and elation, rendered by a constant back-and-forth between intimate details and monumental gestures, between the minuscule human scale and the infinite grandeur of time, is the challenge of the painter's work and the aim of this exhibition at the Musée de Tessé.

 

General curation: Marie Ely, heritage curator, head of 19th-21st century fine arts collections at the Musées du Mans.