Galerie Claude Lemand

Raoul-Jean Moulin. "Benanteur’s painting, renewed year after year by his growing knowl­edge of museums, and freed of the par­allel expe­ri­ence of engraving, little by little gave up the dis­ci­pline of strip­ping down, and gave itself up whole­heart­edly, finding a new land­scape, not a stranger to the pre­vious one, although very dif­ferent in its essence, like another side to his quest, where he attained a cer­tain form of beat­i­tude, a kind of heav­enly garden recon­sti­tuting by com­bining them, the thou­sand and one morn­ings of the world.

Here, from one trip­tych to another, Arabia (1984), Les élus (1986), L’élu (1987), the figure is no more than a clue, a mark, indi­cating the mea­sure of man’s coming to grips with the world and its ele­ments. An enchanted earth, like in the dip­tych La fugue (1988), no longer altered but bathed by the rising and set­ting sun­light, overrun by the cool­ness of rivers across the coun­tryside, hiding its sources in the prairies’ dense grass, and inside the mossy rocks of the dark and deep forests.» (Raoul-Jean Moulin, Benanteur’s own Imaginery, in BENANTEUR, Paintings, Monograph volume 1 pub­lished by Claude Lemand Art Publisher, Paris, 2002)