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

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Over two decades, Benjamin Renoux has worked at the intersection of photography and painting to explore the contemporary confusion between physical and digital realities. Through self-portraits and intimate scenes staging his relatives and queer community, bodies and objects inhabit a fragmented universe where digital mediation reshapes our relationship to reality, to others, and to ourselves.

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His practice stems from a personal experience: that of 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, sexuality, and relationships through the screen, in a dematerialized reality where contact with the world remained distant, mediated, more fantasized than lived. In adulthood, this lack transformed into an artistic gesture: printing life-size figures and physically confronting them, hands covered in paint (see archive from 2006 bellow). These traces remain at the heart of his painted photographs today. They testify to a silent dance with the photographic presences that inhabit his studio, and to a desire to touch, to exist, and to belong to the world through a bodily relationship to the image.

 

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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Download full CV in PDF here

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