Through an autobiographical practice rooted in his queer identity, Benjamin Renoux questions his unsettled relationship to images in a world where digital omnipresence layers multiple realities. Combining photography with other media (painting, sculpture, video), he unfolds an anxious poetry, poised between pictorial monumentality and documentary fragility, attuned to the fractures of a crisis-ridden present.

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As a teenager in rural France in the early 2000s, Benjamin Renoux grew up isolated from conversations around homosexuality. In this social void, the digital realm imposed itself as a relational horizon, shaping his connection to others ever after: dating sites, webcams, and social networks became both a source of fantasy and a deep sense of isolation. This tension between the desire for connection and the solitude amplified by the screen gave rise to a visceral need for physical contact with images. To touch absent bodies, to leave a trace, to seek real dialogue with virtual presences—this is the founding gesture of his artistic approach.

 

Two main media currently structure his practice: large-scale photographic compositions that he reworks with oil paint as a form of performance, and intimate analog photography capturing his close circle in daily life. These two poles are in constant dialogue, often portraying the same “heroes” through different realities. His work also extends to video and sculpture, where photography, transformed into concept or structural object, reflects alternate realities and takes shape within a shifting space-time.

 

His canvases originate from digital photographs, often taken with people close to him. Reconstructed in Photoshop, they are printed life-size on canvas, occupying the studio like imaginary presences. The artist then applies oil paint directly with his hands (as he has from the beginning)  or with a brush, using translucent glazes of varying opacity to reveal or obscure the underlying image. Two worlds collide: on one side, hyperreal digital printing, borrowing from the codes of photography and digital montage; on the other, the vibrancy and materiality of paint, with its gestures and large flat areas. Between contemplative abstraction and hyperrealism, this layered aesthetic produces bidimensional images that evoke the screen, shaped by references to art history, where personal stories resonate with broader human conditions.

 

Finally, his analog series The Quiet Resistance of Intimacy documents his daily life and his most intimate bonds. Experienced as a detox from digital saturation, these imperfect images capture tenderness, solitude, silences, and laughter among his chosen family—a political and emotional refuge in the face of a world in upheaval.