THE SIT DOWN
19: BENJAMIN BLANC
Look back five years and the work is recognisably his. The focus on colour and figuration has held steady. What has changed is the surface; early paintings leaned on a glazing technique closer to pre-modernist times. Blanc has since committed fully to a contemporary expressionist approach by embracing opacity. He mixes his own grounds with chalk and treats his linseed oil to change its drying time and consistency. For him the mediums matter almost as much as the paint.
His subject is the body and how it sits within a space — how it can stand or slump, lie or lounge. The interior has been his setting, partly in response to an increasingly confined post-Covid world, and partly because the edges of the stretcher act like the walls of a room. He is not drawn to epic scenes. He prefers something closer to chamber music, small and muted, the kind of mundane moment that rewards a longer look.
Painting the body as it feels rather than how it looks sits close to the work. Blanc no longer paints from reference, and his compositions come from imagination. A wet-on-wet approach has given way to something looser, where accidents can happen. He works on several canvases at once and lets them bleed into one another. He sets himself parameters to work within, moving between very large and very small formats. Big canvases mean life-size figures, which make the viewer feel part of the room. His drawings sit apart from all this. They are a way of warming up rather than planning.
Blanc has shown in London, Paris and Brussels. In Brussels, Galerie Peter Gaugy has given him a two-person exhibition, Interiority, with the American sculptor Gracelee Lawrence (2025–26), and included him in the group show Post-Coital, Have a Cigarette (2026). In September 2026 he was one of five finalists for the ACS Studio Prize, exhibited at Gurr Johns in St James’s. He is now working towards a new body of work from his new studio at the Florence Trust.