Benoît Andro

I make figurative paintings which globally deal with “images”. In a picture, I would like to give visibility to the close comparison between painting and drawing, with “the image” and, this for some time, with the pixellized form of the digital photograph. What interests me is the idea of making in paint and by paint. I always work with oil and pigment on canvases. I like to be in the “studio”, a well constructed, well signposted space, with high walls around me, but also a terrain of contradictions around which my work is organized. There is, for example, the contrast between the “multiple image” mechanically elaborated for its quick distribution and the “unique picture”, manually executed. Within the picture, I often feel like simultaneously evoking what is, on the face of it, culturally promoted, with what is not. I feel like evoking a world where the museum painting finds itself in a duel with an ephemeral, current, and advertising imagery. I like the tactile nature of the “picture”, its roughness, its constant fixedness, and the idea that we have of such an object, conceived in a craftsman-like way, and its confrontation with our flat computer screens, and the polished images which they broadcast.
I often draw with a desire to simplify, and with simplification as my goal. I find inspiration in the printed image which, in bygone times, had to be simple so that it could be easily reproduced, screened and distributed. It is the popular image enlarged by its coloured outlines which, by becoming a painting, thus has access to another dimension. The drawing is not an end in itself. I always draw with the idea of making a picture out of it later, unless what is involved is a drawn story or “comic strip”. The drawing is a project.