Exhibitions
16 March 2023
“Colour is at the centre of my work”, confides Alexandre Benjamin Navet. The artist, who has seduced people with his flamboyant canvases with a childlike innocence, is multiplying his collaborations: he has signed a collection of carpets and rugs for Codimat, taken over 5th Avenue in New York City at the request of Van Cleef & Arpels, transformed the courtyard of the Hôtel de Crillon into a Yacht Club, reinvented the facades of the Hôtel des Arts in Toulon and imagined window displays for Hermès Petit H.
Although he trained as a designer at the Ensci Les Ateliers school, drawing remains his preferred means of expression. On the occasion of his next exhibition, a Carte Blanche proposed by the National Assembly for which he has imagined five monumental sculptures, vases assembled in the form of totems, the Parisian talks about his love of pigments, the artists who have marked him and, of course, the challenges he has taken up to complete this project. To be discovered in the Palais Bourbon for a period of three months from 22 March 2023.
Has colour always been part of your daily life?
“When I was a child, my parents gave me a big box of crayons. When I was drawing, I would get out of the box and draw on the walls. I was already freeing myself from borders. I had this love of colour and, when I visited the Fernand Léger National Museum in Biot, I was amazed by the work of this artist. His way of working with nuances and multiplying supports inspired me a lot.
Colour is central to my work. I collect pigments, am interested in books about shades such as An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour: The Harvard Art Museums’ Forbes Pigment Collection (Atelier Edition), a wonderful book that evokes a slew of adventures of researchers, or Hervé Fischer’s Les couleurs de l’Occident: De la Préhistoire au XXIᵉ siècle (Gallimard).
I was born in Paris, studied in the capital and then left to discover the world. I also travelled around France, particularly in the South East, a very beautiful region. The Mediterranean brought me another vision of colour and my various projects with the Villa Noailles in Hyères allowed me to affirm these tonic tones – on the Côte d’Azur, oranges are very powerful. Then I discovered watercolour in Japan, the moss greens. All these experiences and my travels allow me to enrich my palette.”
“The whole point of my various collaborations is that I can go even further in experimentation. For Van Cleef & Arpels, I looked for the right pigments to reproduce the precious stones palette that fascinated me so much.
For my paintings, I work colour by colour, they are not mixed, they are treated in a pure way in order to explode their chromatic power. Obviously, everyone interprets the colours differently, so I leave the viewer free to create their own imagination.”
What are your favourite materials?
“I prefer pigment-dense tools. I mainly use oil pastels, although I have sometimes had fun with Japanese watercolour. But highly pigmented, which is close to gouache.”
“The President of the National Assembly wanted to give an artist carte blanche for a period of three months. The Derouillon gallery, which represents me, was contacted and my name was quickly mentioned. So I went to the palace for the first time. I was able to wander around, discover the places and monuments, and soak up the ornaments.
I was struck by the solemnity of the Cour d’Honneur. I liked the façade of the building on this side. Then you go on and arrive at the Jardin des Quatre-Colonnes. One of my last exhibitions was entitled « Jardins » and I did a parallel project on English gardens with the French Institute in London [« Jardins et Paysages – Carte Blanche à Alexandre Benjamin Navet », 2022, NDLR]. – This theme touches me a lot – I am very attracted by green spaces. Following this visit, I made a series of sketches of these two spaces.
Once the project was validated, I went back to the National Assembly and photographed the ornaments, which I hadn’t dared to do before: I’m always more at ease during the second location. The city is a subject that interests me, and being able to express myself at the National Assembly seems to me a good way of encouraging more porosity by inviting the public there and making it a place of exchange.”
Why did you choose totems as the medium for this project?
“For the first time, my drawings leave the flat surface and blossom into three-dimensional sculptures. These totems in the form of columns respond to the beautiful verticality present in these two spaces and blend naturally into this landscape. I wanted to make them into a forest through which visitors can wander. Their slender shape allows them to be visible from a distance without obstructing the flow of traffic.
Why did you choose vases as the starting objects for these totems?
I studied the object at the Ensci Les Ateliers school. So I pay tribute to it in my work: vases and stools are omnipresent. But it is true that I have a special relationship with this container that I collect. Vases are objects of memory, of moments, of memory: they remind me of places I’ve been or of particular people.
“Indeed, my work tends more and more towards the large scale. This Carte Blanche is part of a series of projects such as the Façades Chromatiques in Nantes, the Hôtel des Arts in Toulon and my collaboration with Van Cleef & Arpels, which feature objects, sculptures and settings in the city.”
Jean Dubuffet’s “La Tour aux figures”, located in Issy-les-Moulineaux, on the banks of the Seine. I took from it the way he translated his drawing into volume from a technical point of view. And then, it’s a living work, which you can enter. I have always wanted to push back the boundaries of the simple sheet of paper or the white canvas. Often, when I invest a space, I don’t restrict myself to these frames. I try to immerse the viewer in my sketchbooks and create a global universe. I like them to wander through my work.
“The great difficulty was to translate my drawings into monumental three-dimensional pieces. To do this, there were several stages: first I sketched my totems in pencil, then I worked with a ceramist who made miniature sculptures of them. Finally, the form is translated on a large scale, which is what we are doing at the moment, in the Actes 2 workshops, which gives me access to the necessary materials and craftsmen.
We also had to meet weight constraints, which added an extra challenge. For this, we used polystyrene: Manu, with the help of a hot wire, rasps and other brushes, shapes the material as close as possible to the scale models. Then, the structures are covered with a coating that gives the sculptures a rather impressive organic appearance. At this point, I sketch my motifs using my favourite oil pastels as I would have done on a white canvas. The whole thing is finally covered with a varnish to ensure its durability and to protect it from the elements. I was particularly pleased to see how faithful Manu had been to my work and my intentions.”
