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.
PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
As expected as this may sound, art history has an ever-growing influence on my work. I think of a specific lineage from Rococo painters like Watteau and Chardin, through works by proto-expressionists Monticelli, Soutine and Ensor, all the way to the British School of Painting. I remember visiting All Too Human at Tate Britain in 2018 and for the first time starting to grasp what painting, both as maker and viewer, was meant to feel like.
Their paintings always bring me back to the present, and vice versa… I think of the journey to the studio, the grays of a puddle, the thousands of faces you walk past in a capital city. Most of all, I’m influenced by human choreographies and tendencies, and the bravery in their rupture.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
The same way I’m seeking a sense of interconnectedness when I look around, I suppose I would want this to be felt through my work - in its lonely, awkward moments or on the flipside through excessive scenes.
I think I’m looking to give a balsamic taste to my paintings, one that repels and compels at the same time. I would love them to feel personal, in the way that they could be appropriated by the viewer.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
Painting in the studio often feels like a sport. I move around the canvases a lot, I mix my paint in pots and load my brushes, and compose pictures pretty intuitively. Colour comes after, and it can always be scraped off, tweaked and put on the canvas again if needed. Added to the kind of physical ease it demands, I also need to keep a clear sight to deal with pictorial problems arising in the picture I’m making. These two qualities do not always coincide which could make for a clunky picture, but there will always be some kind of pivot in the work where one seems to feed into the other. When colour, form, and matter embrace ideas and subjects, it feels more like dancing and gives way to emotions, desire and pleasure in the work itself.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
I would love to resuscitate Maria Lassnig for a nice restaurant, though I’m thinking she might be very specific about her choices.
I have looked at a lot of her work, and recently read her letters with Hans Ulricht Obrist and it seems that she really embodied her paintings. I find beauty in both her and her work, in their solitude and decisiveness, and I would really love to see this for myself. I don’t think I’d have much to say, though I’d try to entertain her in return out of courtesy, but I would really enjoy listening to her.