Carole Benzaken

In 1994, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain was the first institution to present Carole Benzaken’s work. Exploring the possibilities of image, form, and color, Carole Benzaken’s paintings flee the anecdotal. Taking supremely commonplace photographs from horticultural catalogs as her point of departure, the artist proposes an ever-renewed questioning of the pictorial image and its layout.
The gouaches presented in the catalog portray not a flower, but the image of a flower. More than ever, the artist’s painting designates, to quote Mallarmé, “l’absente de tous bouquets,” the ideal flower that is absent from real bouquets.