Journey

Benoît Galifer

René Benoît Galifer was born in 1944 in Arles, a nurturing city deeply steeped in culture and traditions. From high school onwards, he came into contact with painting very early through Théo Rigaud, drawing teacher at the lycée and a known painter... though belatedly recognized. Despite an early artistic sensitivity that earned him at age 16 a first prize in drawing at a Youth Festival organized by the city and which made him briefly consider an artistic career, his choices led him in 1963 to embark at the University of Montpellier on the long curriculum of medical studies that would make him a recognized academic, professor of pediatric surgery and department head at the university hospital. A brilliant and demanding journey in contact with sick or malformed children that would end in 2012, rich with an unforgettable human experience accumulated at the cost... of half a century without painting! But the desire was always there, a veritable dormant cell, and suddenly it resurged with force like an underground spring whose very existence he had almost forgotten, intact as in the early days, virgin of any academic training - both strength and weakness - but enriched by a slow and unconscious maturation process. Released then from all the constraints that structured his life as a surgeon, he takes up the brushes again as if he had abandoned them the day before and rediscovers the freedom of creation, of improvisation, doubt and the right to failure, as well as the exhilaration that comes from not knowing when facing the blank canvas how far and into what unknown territories it might lead. The result is a raw painting that refuses no contradiction or experimentation, a free and spontaneous painting letting the random and unexpected emerge, an intuitive painting obeying no fashion or technical dictate, a painting of immediate access because based on percept not concept and whose only pretensions are to let affirm a thwarted passion that, in another life, could have fulfilled him completely, and to express the optimism reflected in such a late creative work... even if deep down he knows he may not have time to see it through.

Artistic Approach

It is in the representation of the four symbolic elements of nature: water, earth, air and fire, that his permanent search for a personal, if not original, writing style is most evident. Tormented skies, angry seas, endless horizons, inexactitude of distant views, so many elements that oppose or respond to each other on either side of horizontal interfaces that recall the lyrical abstraction of a Rothko or a de Staël. These landscapes, often imaginary and anonymous though evoking in filigree that Arles country where he was born and raised and this Languedoc where he now lives, translate his temptation toward abstraction and reveal multiple influences that blend to achieve a dreamlike poetry halfway between reality and fiction, which suggests more than it affirms, leaving those who contemplate them the possibility of reinterpretation and appropriation. Alongside these horizontal compositions, he paints the verticality of modern cities inspired by those great cities of the North American dream where he stayed, urban landscapes paradoxically marked by great solitude expressed through their quasi-deserted representation and the choice of rather dark tones. The third theme, more intimate, is the materialization of the powerful emotional bond that unites him to his lands of birth and adoption, marked by a pictorial expression that becomes more figurative there as if, in an inverse approach, he wanted to give reality back to his most blurred memories.

Technique and Mediums

Benoît Galifer has made the almost exclusive choice of acrylic on different supports: canvas, paper, cardboard.

Today

Since late 2012, Benoît Galifer now devotes himself in his studio to reactivating his first passion which he rediscovers after half a century of infidelity like a former and still demanding mistress. But she, she has not aged and trying to reconquer her remains an effort of every moment. Benoît Galifer, an old 'young' painter who wants to testify that artistic emergence has no age!