Claude-Philippe Benoit
"Claude-Philippe Benoit" by Emily Falvey, Winter 2006, pp. 84-85
Claude-Philippe Benoit’s most recent exhibition brings together three bodies of photographic work from the last six years: L’étoffe du prince et son éternité; En cour, pour un oui pour un non; and his latest series, Société de ville. The first two series are part of a larger opus Benoit began in the 1990s that explored the workshops and fitting rooms of Parisian tailors and the judiciary, and the constructions of power proposed by each. The most recent series focuses primarily upon our relationship with nature in an urban setting.
Despite their different subjects, Benoit’s photographs are tied together by a disturbing, eerily beautiful stillness. Indeed, he has described his images as “frozen instants” in which the feeling of cinematic drama persists “after the actors have left the set.” In the case of L’étoffe du prince et son éternité, the tailors’ workshops pictured in the images are evidently the locus of frenetic daily activity, and yet they appear disconcertingly timeless—at once authentic and slightly inhuman, much like a museum display or a crime scene. In these diverse ateliers, the figure of masculine power is cut to size in fabric (étoffe). Ironically, the French verb étoffer (to stuff) is remarkably close to étouffer (to suffocate).
Société de ville comprises a series of large-format black-and-white photographs of urban wilderness, the pockets and fringes of uncultivated plant life that one finds at the margins of city environments. Here Benoit has reversed a device commonly associated with Canadian landscape painting: the screen of trees. Historically, Canadian artists have tended to present the wilderness as inaccessible and forbidding, a feeling often created by presenting some awesome feature of the landscape, such as a mountain peak, warded off by a screen of impenetrable trees. In Benoit’s photographs, the mountains have been replaced with the looming, almost Gothic architecture of the city. The viewer now peers out from the tattered yet insistent remains of the forest, like a member of some alternative society forced to take refuge in the undergrowth.
It is worth mentioning the technical quality of Benoit’s photographs, all of which are large-format silver prints. Interesting photographic projects are too often compromised by poor-quality digital formats. The composition, tone and texture of Benoit’s prints are truly breathtaking.
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