Benetto, Éric
France, 1972
For Éric Benetto, born in 1972 in La Roche-sur-Yon, the discovery – at the age of 17 – of the coal miner Augustin Lesage’s mediumistic work was a veritable epiphany. Profoundly meditative, fundamentally distrustful, Benetto finally understood that his feeling of exile would find an unexpected outlet in art. While working in all manner of jobs between two trips to India – railway worker, telephone pollster, chemical plant security guard, and so many others – he began to transcribe what would become his formal grammar in travel journals. Soon, Indian ink especially, and pencil at times, would come to conquer larger surfaces. At first, he used brown paper, before he discovered, thanks to a job in a hospital, the potential of radiographs and other MRI images: simultaneous transparency and darkness in search of light. His core work is not only marked by an intense, syncretic mysticism, but also by an exceptional moderness.
