Benoît Vermander

The exhibition "L'Attrait du Trait" (The Allure of the Brush), organized by Espace Culturel ICICLE and curated by Myriam Kryger, presents twelve works created by Benoît Vermander between 2020 and 2022 using Chinese brush and ink on rice paper.

中文簡介

PRESENTATION OF BENOIT VERMANDER

BY MYRIAM KRYGER, CURATOR OF THE EXHIBITION

“As the wind blows”

You can have poor eyesight and still see everything, faulty hearing and still hear everything, be clumsy and still do it right. Such is the power of exceptional intelligence, remarkable sensitivity and most generous openness to others. Such is Benoit Vermander, who engages in painting, poetry, and a most demanding intellectual and academic activity.

An ‘honnête homme’ in the French meaning of the expression ‘upstanding man’ as much as a ‘scholar’ in the Chinese sense of the term, this great and modest scholar is the bearer of a dual cultural heritage, which he synthesises in a highly personal and resolutely contemporary way to carve out an original path.

With a doctorate in political science, it was as a young adviser to the President of a French Region that he first set foot in China in 1987. During this brief mission, he fell in love with calligraphy, which led to his twin “second birth” as an artist and sinologist. Without knowing anything about China or its aesthetics, he immediately realised that “calligraphy is a seismograph of our inner life”, to use François Cheng's phrase. This intuition led him to start learning calligraphy and Mandarin. A few years later, he moved to China, where he has lived and worked for three decades. He has become one of the world's leading sinologists, holds a doctorate in theology and is a professor in the philosophy department of Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University. He teaches religious anthropology and founded the Matteo Ricci - Xu Guangqi Research Centre for Dialogue between Civilisations and Religions.

From those who paint because they write, to those who paint so as not to be suffocated by words, artistic creations are born of a process of disalienation from the verbal. We will therefore avoid cluttering up the twelve inks on paper presented in “L'Attrait du Trait” with commentaries. Whatever the motif - man, tree, bird, mountain - whatever the stress on the abstract or the figurative, the stress on imagination or memory, Benoit Vermander's works are the result of a long spiritual journey as much as they adhere to a moment of pure presence, freeing us from all shackles. “I paint in order to decondition myself.” He could make his own this statement by Henri Michaux, with whom he has so much in common.

For Benoit Vermander, it is as much the transition from writing to painting as from one cultural mode to another that constitutes an experience of liberation: “It is not Western culture that represents slavery and Chinese culture that represents freedom, or vice versa. It is the passage from one cultural mode to another that is in itself an experience of liberation.”

More precisely, it is the inner integration of these two cultures within the same work of art that bears witness to a journey towards greater inner unity and freedom. I never ask myself whether what I create is more Chinese or more Western. I choose what is best for me. I choose by instinct, I choose by taste. I let myself be carried along. I am born as I create.

Oscillating between verbal and pictorial language, Western philosophy and Chinese spirituality, the time-consuming nature of knowledge and the immediacy of gesture, speech and silence, erudition and imagination, mastery and letting go, Benoit Vermander never ceases to straddle frontiers and navigate between worlds. Always on the move, driven by a genuine ethic of the encounter, he delves into this in- between passage. It is hardly surprising that he explores an artistic path with ink and paper, the technique of fluidity “par excellence”, one that leaves plenty of room for chance and accident, the very conditions of a genuine encounter. And nothing feels better than an encounter with Benoit Vermander. May the wind – the wind he loves so much because it sets everything in motion without us ever knowing where it comes from or where it goes - leads you to cross his path.

Version Française du texte de Myriam Kryger
中文版