Jacquemin Benoit

• Born in 1993, Liège, Belgium
• Lives and works in Belgium

It was with Velázquez that he understood that art could only be visual shock, and with Pollock that he grasped the importance of energy in a work. Although Benoit Jacquemin holds a master's degree in photography, his work is largely multidisciplinary. While the image remains the guiding principle, it is only a point of departure. Each project is conceived as an autonomous object, driven by a dialogue between the original intention, the demands of the artistic process and the invention of forms and materials whose strength he must understand and master in order to bring meaning to life.
His "objects" and installations - such as the glass staircase exhibited at Marseille's Belle de Mai, or the forty large mirrored diamonds glittering overhead at the entrance to the Macors company - reveal the main thrust of an art that can only be conceived in the sharing of aesthetic shock. The reality of shapes collides with associations of materials, colors or sizes, to bring out a discharge of energy and transport the viewer to an elsewhere that can last a second or a lifetime, that can emerge with a delay, but that can only be grasped through the exercise of the eye. In this sense, a work can only be conceived as a visual shock, and in the intensity of an experience that opens us up to a different perception of time.
And so it is with his marquetry paintings, which take their cue from advertising images from the 30s and 50s, and enter into a dialogue with the history of Belgium, his own family history - one of his grandmothers was Congolese - and a technical bias, that of using exotic woods that are still massively imported from Africa today.
Each panel reinterprets these seemingly innocuous little chromos, and bears witness to the complexity of a troubling face-off between friendly propaganda extolling the charms of a country and the complex, troubled and violent history of its colonization, in an attempt at neutrality that knows itself to be illusory because it is entangled in this history of men and intimacy.Complexity inscribed in the very material of wood, as ordinary as it is precious.
Text by Isabelle Poujet, 2024