Born in 1986 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

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For over twenty years, Benjamin Renoux has worked at the intersection of photography and painting, among other mediums, to depict a world undergoing dematerialization, where physical and digital realities increasingly blur into one another. Through self-portraits and intimate scenes involving those close to him, bodies and objects inhabit a fragmented universe where digital mediation reshapes our relationship to reality, to others, and to ourselves.

 

His practice originates in a personal experience: growing up as a queer teenager in rural France in the 2000s, for whom the Internet was the only mirror. Deprived of role models, he constructed his identity, his sexuality, and his relationships with others through the screen, in a dematerialized reality where contact with the world remained distant, mediated, more fantasized than experienced. The absence of physical presence became an artistic gesture early in his adult life: printing life-size images of bodies and confronting them physically, his hands covered in paint. These traces, at the core of his painted photographs, reflect a desire to touch, to exist, to belong to the world through a physical relationship to omnipresent images.

 

His studio is thus filled with physical presences: self-portraits, loved ones, encounters, fixed by photography and traversed by paint. More recently, objects from everyday life have entered the work — his own, those of people close to him, and those he finds — at a more intimate scale. His practice is a constant back-and-forth between digital processes and pictorial materiality. His painting, often applied directly by hand, is built through layers of glazes: working on the photographic print through variations of transparency and opacity to reveal as much as to conceal. Separated from the photograph, his painting would be pure abstraction, made of handprints, brushstrokes, gestures, imprints. Applied onto it, these same gestures begin to suggest something else: black glazes in the backgrounds become a sculpting of light, monochrome planes dislocate the bodies, and the forms around a glass loosely evoke fruits. The hyperrealism of the photograph assigns meaning to the gesture, directs interpretation, and anchors abstraction in reality. Meanwhile, the expressionism of the paint destabilizes the subjects, dissolving them into vibrant, contemplative atmospheres where they begin to slip away from a purely tangible reality.

 

Between 2011 and 2019, his practice extended to sculpture, video and installation, where photography acted as both concept and structural object to describe an intimate, multi-layered world. Since 2019, he has developed The Quiet Resistance of Intimacy, an ongoing analog photography project documenting his everyday life with vulnerability and slowness, where celebration and activism form only part of the queer narrative. This long-term research now informs his large-scale painted photographs and recent engagement with still life.

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The artist is represented by Baert Gallery in Los Angeles, USA. His work has been showcased in numerous solo and group exhibitions in institutions, fairs and galleries in Europe and the United States and is part of several private and public collections, including the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris). In 2018, his sculptural work was featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow (Thames & Hudson). Benjamin Renoux earned an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, University of the Arts London, in 2014.

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