PHILIPPE BENICHOU ~ ARTIST STATEMENT © 2000-2020
I was led to becoming an artist through a spiritual quest that began when I was a child and crystallised in the late 1990’s. I never consciously intended to paint. I have always been intensely fascinated by the innermost workings of the universe, both physical and spiritual. Finding keen similarities between the vastness of the expanding cosmos, freedom of mind and consciousness, I often imagine myself as a space traveler.
I had no real personal inkling as to what an artist truly was until I started painting. It propelled me onto a new path of self-discovery, gratitude and, at the risk of sounding naïve, self-love as I have learned to value the “individual within myself” here to serve and empower others.
With much humour, I see myself as an emotional spirit in constant motion and mutation. Am I a mystical poet-scholar of sorts or, at times, a contemplative creature, a wolf-child who ponders universal consciousness and translates it into contemporary expressions in the now? My mediums are the word, form and behaviour, color and patterns in all their frequencies and atmospheres. I am passionate about rhythm, concentrated work, learning, the self, movement and the art of love. I love life, Earth, humanity, self-expression and talent.
Frankly, the true spirit of an artist is not just in his works, even though his or her works naturally contain it. The true spirit of an artist lives and dwells in his ideas. They must be refined, probed and investigated personally. Ideas are the hidden cosmic fuel of our most mutative transformations and awakenings. The big bang may very well have been an idea. Ideas whose timing has come, tear into the fabric of being and spread their new atmospheres. Ideas are free, freer than art. Art simply gives them a form and a voice.
To me, medium and technique are subordinate to idea. The art is only a means of transport so the ideas can be seen in a new language, regardless of the medium. It thus becomes the differentiated language of the unique expression of the artist. Without the pursuit of autonomy and uniqueness, there can only be more or less well-executed homogenised, systematic, life-less and unoriginal duplications of already established ideas and already existing works.
When I am no longer here to thrive and survive, I can begin to express my true potential.
I am just an innocent spirit-watcher. Being aware, which I describe and experience as a watching or seeing, actually offers me the astonishing opportunity to mutate my character consciousness through choice. It also offers freedom from bondage and oppression; especially when the watching totally stays away from watching how my life is being run or what is going to happen. The choice seems obvious; what I am is a complex medium through which certain aspects of the totality of life express themselves naturally and creatively; as if what I think, feel, say, write or paint has so little to do with me.
It is clear to me that I am a trinity-consciousness: body consciousness, character consciousness and spirit consciousness. The body leads me well and decides my direction, my character entertains and the spirit witnesses and learns. The more I stay out of the picture and outcome of my life, the more liberated my expression and potential become. Trinity is alive and well; we are in its contemporary expression phase, which is a three-dimensional individual construct—not a mass movement.
To me, an idea is simply a metaphor waiting for its time, its form and expression. I call this process an “as-if”. It feels that creative as-ifs shape-shift, morph and mutate energy and its frequencies. An as-if is a probable idea and the fuel of my imagination. “As if I am an artist daring to express” was my first deciding “as if” as an artist.
When my spirit is not focused on survival, competitiveness and power games (my inevitable ancient heritage), I express myself in a completely new paradigm? I often argue that even when I do focus on survival and power games I am still me; but I make a distinction: my authentic self is a mutation as I see it. The other self is my old snakeskin that hangs on, rubs and rattles in the shadows.
The unknown becomes a creative well of possibilities, which now have a chance to manifest. The ancestral alphabet was my foundation for expression and it led me to speak my feelings and ideas on canvas. There is a new alphabet to explore and experience in our digital world; a binary alphabet, which speaks of dualistic patterns seeking harmony and co-existence. There are as many alphabets as there are languages, which can blossom from them. From my viewpoint, what is often missing is the knowledge that only the pursuit and revealing of my uniqueness brings about individuated true expression.
I value originality, imagination, intelligence, generosity, kindness and competence. I see my purpose as a mutating of decaying modalities into new forms and new perspectives. On the mundane plane, I am an artist and student of behaviour, of the word and of the confident form. My mind is free to explore very much like a freed genie who no longer serves a master of wishes. Myself is my canvas.
I feel like my spirit is in a constant state of creative meditation, free to roam through other planes and dimensions. I paint from inner visions and intense emotions, impossible to organise in words, which I let go of on canvas instead.
My paintings are proofs and accounts of my travels and spiritual reflections. I seem to follow an inner guide and a wisdom resembling an internal muse. It supplies me with tremendous joy and a feeling of long forgotten peace and natural knowing.
My work is an extension and a clarification of my strongest, clearest and most intimate creative reflections. It began as journeys and essays in intuitive awareness. I am convinced that what I manifest in physical form is but a dim reflection of what my spirit is capable of. I sense that we are here to manifest the magnificence of life and demonstrate to one another the potential of individual and personal self-expression.
Trusting that we all play a specific role in the great mythology of life, I see myself as a mystical dualist. I see the physical realm as a communication platform for higher consciousness and myself as an emotional spirit or a mystical poet channeling universal consciousness in a humble, yet unique way.
I am deeply grateful to artists who have exposed their thoughts on life as it relates to art; writing is an integral and ritualistic part of my journey as an artist. I believe the artist has the divine duty to keep one foot in the mysteries of creation, thus preventing man to be completed engulfed in the illusion of civilisation. My late mother, Arlette Oger, was an artist with strength and foresight. She exposed her process to me and she will always remain an inspiring and authentic role model.
My work is for the most part expressive: contemporary abstract and abstract-expressionist with an intense and free use of color. As an abstract artist I externalise on canvas what I am experiencing within but cannot express in words or symbolically. My definition of abstraction is experience itself. Experience cannot be communicated outside of its abstraction. The forms, shapes, lines and colours that come out are no longer recognisable objects from my projected self-images—what I think I know about myself and the world around me. Life, from this viewpoint, becomes a continual dance of appearing and disappearing forms creating inner connections that appeal to the senses not the intellect.
Abstract art is my awakening from self-image and mind-based projected reality. When I no longer recognise something in a work of art I begin to know myself as pure experience. I become transparent to the ideas of myself¬—who I think I am. I reach beyond mind into pure abstract feelings and immediate knowing. I like to call such abstraction a sort of intuitive awareness, surrender, path of least resistance and the very spirit of freedom.
My art aims at the liberation from self-image based living toward a more integrated living where I recognise more of the totality and complex nuances of who I am, and begin to experience it as a self-aware and no longer a self-conscious individual.
I see things as they are through the energy field of awareness produced by correct and harmonious abstract forms through countless shapes and colours. Only the absence of this understanding or intuitive feeling brings momentary sense of loss.
Color and specifically color compositions are healing because they are orgasmic at the level of the self. Having no mundane purpose, they effortlessly propel me toward my true nature.
Abstract art as well as abstract feelings help me get in touch with cosmic vastness and universal belonging to life as a whole.
Abstraction is in a very real sense the actual context of my existence. Society, language and words are abstractions of nature; they can only aim at describing reality. From this viewpoint, the true purpose of art can be seen as the empowerment of the individual and, consequently, the elevation of consciousness through mutative constructs.
All my paintings aim at intuitive awakening, which is the blissful certitude of our temporary existence in various forms and externalised modalities.
I use various media to produce unusual textures, shapes, compositions and color coordination. I believe color has a primitive healing effect provided it contains and aims at harmony. I am interested in surprising dynamics, rhythms and relationships. I create series spontaneously based on techniques and ideas I have been subconsciously developing and refining over the years. Ideas seem to occur naturally as part of the process. I do not paint from thought projections or left-brain imagery and prefer to leave my conscious self as removed from the process as possible. Color and line engender shapes that eventually lead me to a harmony of composition and feeling, which I reckon is the ultimate plastic purpose.
I do not typically lean toward representational work as I view the world as a dance of mirage-like manifestations and appearances caught in a dualistic dance. Self-based versus mind-based art is where my truth lies, without denying the scrumptious powers of the mind. When I no longer see an object that I recognise in a work of art, I am expressing more than I am representing. Technique has been left behind and is no longer visible—the aim of any true artist.
My spirit has ways of seeing that my eyes cannot comprehend.
I find soothing peace when I escape the world of accepted forms and favour expressing myself freely and openly. Creative imagination and spiritual reflection through the act of painting is the closest I get to formlessness without limits. To work with the un-interpreted and yet, engender clarity, freedom and, consequently, a slow but present sense of evolution through intuitive and mutative awareness.
Painting to me IS thinking in action, profound and on all levels but it is also an honouring and celebration of existence in all its forms, shapes and colours.
Living in a political, delicate and sensitive world, I must participate in the process of completely consuming the atmospheres around me in order to process them artistically. My paintings are like books and maps. I write so much in them. I journey like a guided vessel through rich internal experiences removed from the psychological babbling of the “real” homogenised world.
It is essential to share where I stand regarding the place of the artist in society. I intuitively see that we have arrived at the confident age of the individual. Each individual is meant to emerge in all his or her attractiveness and personal destiny based on individual choice not on societal conditioning from the past.
Too few struggle against normalcy. I see a silent revolution and an immutable evolution in progress. It is a process and has always been met with a great deal of resistance by our ancestral conditioning. As a species, we have painted into the unknown and raised God-heads in its name to triumph over our fears.
To me, artists are farmers of love and beauty and artists are not limited to works of art in the traditional sense as means of expression. Love and beauty are also cultivated through presence, intuition, gestures, behaviours, facial expressions and awareness, which are just as valid as any plastic forms of expression.
It took several decades to find the strength and courage to begin expressing myself fully in this new medium. I first began doing pastel and tempera works, and then began experimenting with digital media, which was extraordinarily revealing to me. Later, I began using oil, watercolour, inks and various other media. I call my body of work and journey into art: Quantum Creations. To me, quantum means unexpected and spontaneous mutative shifts into new creative paradigms, which can only be grasped after fearless leaps into the unknown, perhaps the very fabric of the universe.
Much of my progress happened as a result of studying under well-known art educator and visionary artist, Francis Coelho, in Mill Valley, California from 1986 to 2002. The work I continue to express as an actor, author, director, and performance coach influences me greatly, so did the atmospheres surrounding my childhood experiences.
“When I no longer recognise something in a work of art, I begin to know myself as pure experience.”
© 2020 Philippe Benichou
