Carole Benzaken : Rien de nouveau sous le soleil

Philippe de Champaigne's Vanité, preserved at the Musée de Tessé, is the starting point for this exhibition devoted to the work of Carole Benzaken, in which the question of vanity is an underlying theme. Her aesthetic of impermanence and her use of paint to put things on hold extends from the Tulips that made her name, to her most recent works, Éclats.

As early as the 1990s, her floral motifs were already evoking the heyday of 17th-century vanitas. After having her relationship with time overturned by her stay in the United States, Carole Benzaken bought a farm in Mayenne in 2006, with the aim of setting up a studio. She frequented the Tessé museum and admired Philippe de Champaigne's masterpieces. It was then that the Ecclesiastes 7:24 series was born. Inspired by the biblical text, it refers literally to the vanity of human things and to an inaccessible "deep, deep".

From this point on, her work is tinged with an important reflection on the ephemeral. For Carole Benzaken, the blurred, diffracted image is conceived as a montage, a superimposition of layers in resistance to the insignificant images that invade our daily lives. The recurring plant motif embodies a cyclical, slow, meditative temporality, a counterpoint to a world caught up in speed.

 

Throughout the exhibition, visitors will discover Carole Benzaken's protean and sensitive work, guided by the Candide drawings, a visual chronicle begun in 2003, capturing ephemeral images doomed to oblivion. The joyful acceptance of this human condition, rendered in an incessant to-and-fro between intimate detail and monumental gesture, between the miniscule human scale and the infinite grandeur of time, is the challenge of the painter's work and the project of this exhibition at the Musée de Tessé.