Carole Benzaken .

Exploring the possibilities of the image, of form and color, Carole Benzaken’s painting flees all anecdotes. Beginning with photographs from gardening catalogues, as banal as can possibly be, this young artist proposes a constantly renewed questioning of the place of pictorial image and the way it is given from in contemporary art. In her series of tulips bursting with color she moves from the photographic image to painting, skipping any direct observation of the motif. A starting point and a referent, the catalogue photograph is presented not as the representation of a thing, but rather as a visual reality to which the artist adds the pictorial realities of gestural brush strokes and material pigment. Using the banal of her formal inventiveness, the artist transforms figuration into abstraction. Carole Benzaken does not offer a flower to our gaze, but a representation, the image of a flower.