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 begin with digital photographs, often of loved ones. Reworked in Photoshop, they are printed life-size on canvas, filling his studio with an imaginary presence. The artist then applies oil paint directly—by hand or brush—in translucent layers. Handprints, recurring marks that cover backgrounds and skin, become signs of presence on the image. This hybrid process gives rise to an ambiguous visual world where two realms meet: the cold, recomposed, and infinitely reproducible realm of digital imagery, and the vibrant, singular gesture of painting. This interplay creates strange, two-dimensional spaces—hovering between contemplative abstraction and hyperrealism—where figures seem to slip into a parallel universe. This distorted aesthetic, shaped by digital codes, becomes a direct metaphor for the disorientation he feels in the growing fusion of real and virtual in our lives.

 

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.