hand squeezes handful striker. Gradually, under the blows, the tool emerges from flint, a biface. This same hand will come later drop his mark on the walls of a cave.
What remains about those men, those actions essential? Tools, bones, paintings ...
Keren Benbenisty appropriates and reinterprets these traces of the past
What needs, what deeply buried desires of man meets the infancy of art dated by archaeologists the Paleolithic era. In this burgeoning art attributed religious functions, magical or shamanistic, but also aesthetic pleasure ... interpretations remain open, with no definite answers ...
Why not consider, so perhaps fanciful in relation to science, these paintings, drawings and sculpture as one of the first claims of man in his environment and as a premise to its autonomy.
Could be interpreted and applied the hand, silhouetted by the light of a spark, a woman or a man, whom we know nothing today. A hand that reminds us of its existence for thousands of years later, the bottom of that cave in all its fragile and precarious humility ...
Similarly, Keren Benbenisty affix signs ... For the imposition of his fingers, specifically fingerprint ...
This repeated application on the white surface, emerging forms. Skulls, bones, faces come under the imprint of fingers raised tirelessly on paper. Keren Benbenisty becomes custodian of this so-distant past, set in its versions by this testamentary act.
It also engages with the economy of means which existed in the Paleolithic.
As pigments, the ink material of choice in Keren Benbenisty.
It is also used as a fluid antecedent in videos like "Love Will Tear Us Apart" or "Blue tree".
The use of ink as a subject also brings us back to our contemporary heir to an ancient civilization built on the writing ...
Video, medium cool, high tech comes to counterpoint to these surfaces inked manually processed in Blender, but does not object. The texture of the image pixelated video meets the images constructed by the multiplication of impressions that act also as many pixels ...
It devolves, somehow, to clarify the role this gallery of skulls, bones, bifaces as the home encouraged the precarious path of the first cave paintings.
"Skull" Keren Benbenisty
Benbenisty Keren's work is not content to be an evocation, a formal game on archeology that de-fossilized, it de- senfouit of the past distance.
This suite of skulls, figures, drawn face and profile, evokes first the museum where the relics of prehistory ... Evokes the course of art history, the tradition of "vanity" portraiture.
Venus of Willendorf "
course, throughout this gallery, we obviously thinks Holbein to Goya, nearby but more subterranean, more subtle with Yves Klein is slipping in this series, including "anthropomorphic" which refer to mother goddesses. In Keren Benbenisty, minimizes the footprint is and does not encompass the entire body, it's just the tip of his finger tip. Keren
Benbenisty thus relates to the artists 'body'
His work also engages us on the path of anthropometry police, who by his series of faces, fingerprints its class, lists, identifies regarding the identity of a person. These fingerprints
multiplied, mantras cantillées to infinity, by Keren Benbenisty refer to this notion of identity. Nothing is more personal because the fingerprint of an individual. This repetition acts as many signatures, assertiveness ... Keren Benbenisty by this act of affixing we share a book and share her intimate, her body ... she recorded in indelible ink the time ... ... But
can a body alone? Without the emergence of what he envisaged two? The work of Keren
Benbenisty addresses this question, concerns the idea of duality.
The biface has in him those qualities of duality, this unit twice in one ... Two sides to keep a face like an impossible symmetry.
And this idea of the perfect double seems doomed to failure ...
"biface" Keren Benbenisty
The video "Peace Attack" comes to remind us. Before a background in darkness, put two matches balanced on the edge of a glass burn at both ends. The two flames gradually approach one another, progressing to "jump cut" punctuated by a soundtrack ... game where each child advance in putting one foot before the other or rather duels, fights delimited by the circumference of the glass. One of the matches fall into the bottom of the glass causing another in the fall ...
Duel game, but also embrace, mating, entwined the two matches, flare up, burn their passion and devote themselves to their loss ... The incandescent
fusional choît into thin curls smoke ...
In "Favorite Nightmare", a merger between two equally impossible light sources. One is electric, the other comes from the flame of a candle ... The background is very dark, indistinct. The filament is mingled with fire: they seem in perfect communion. But this union is soon interrrompue by heterogeneity their nature, the flame burns slowly and swaying. The bulb lights up, turns off abruptly ... So close and yet so far ...
The biface seems the only time they can bring him in this state of perfect communion because of its inherently dual conflict in him are resolved, two is one. But its nature and its use is itself ambivalent tool, slice it, he takes off, it subtracts ... It kills.
A path leads inexorably to the darkness of the cave into the light ...
A path that leads to this almost Vincienne ambiguous sweetness of death ... Where do resist that the skulls and bones ... Who then emerge into the dazzling whiteness of the surface ...
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