Benjamin Renoux

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

By painting over life-size photographs of his surroundings, Benjamin Renoux questions his presence and that of things, bodies, spaces, and human connections within a reality continually doubled by the digital realm. His relationship with images, both imagined and physical, brings the flat hyperrealism of digital prints into tension with the organic materiality of paint, giving form to the ordinary fragility of his queer everyday life. Growing up queer in rural France in the early 2000s, Renoux explored identity, sexuality, and belonging through the internet, finding in images what his immediate surroundings could not offer. In 2006, this distance became a physical gesture: confronting life-size photographs of bodies with paint-covered hands. Today, his subjects include himself, people close to him, and everyday objects. Layers of oil paint reveal, fragment, or dissolve these photographic presences, retaining the traces of bodily contact. The photograph anchors abstract gestures in the real, while paint unsettles what the camera appears to fix. Suspended between image and tangible matter, these works carry a desire to touch, to connect, and to belong.

Artwork