In a recent article I wrote  I mentioned that there are certain artists’ art exhibits that result in a sort of refuge  from the “outdoor uproar” which  contaminates all levels of our political reality, our daily life and – we can´t expect it to be otherwise – the world of art.

It is actually a  healthy and also encouraging experience to visit Laura Benchetrit’s studio, there I found mildness, warmth and silence. The silence needed to contemplate a small work of art. Now, what do I mean by small ? Is it that her work is not important? Absolutely  not, on the contrary.

Fortunately, Laura´s work situates  itself  beyond what could be called “ the art show”, the fashion  art, the controversial art just for the sake of controversy.Laura Benchetrit ´s calling is doing. The sort of doing  that awakens live feelings both in critics and observers, that is open to  intellectual debate and emotional perception.

I was not acquainted with her work until I was  able to observe through different catalogues that on paper, her main “appoggiatura” (support), as the critic Fermin Fevre pointed out in 1993,  she  creates “an expressive atmospheric register, free from defined forms , figurative referents  nor any other image resources”. An evanescent material, a chromatic repertoire that in a graphic manner gives way to shape, or the lack of  it, construed with great spiritual intensity.

Gradually, geometry appeared in her work . We were able to verify it in her 2007 exhibition catalogue: pictures and object-pictures, overlapping panels wherein she “locks up” shapes linked to what is concrete, much more rational, but which also give place to her capacity to fill certain empty spaces with resources coming from her engraving mastery.

For this reason the critic Julio Sánchez pointed out that this new series “ built a bridge between two well defined dimensions….a link between the immediately visible and the adjacently invisible”.  Called as I was to write this text on her present exhibit, I feel at this moment that everything flows naturally: the background colors, a geometry that suggestively slides in seeming to advance, resulting in depth and space to fuse with her favourite techniques, aquarelle, pastels, collograph, within the limits set up by the conventional frame. “The annihilation of the art subject, of the artist, through the un- investiture of the creating act”, a rather apocalyptic phrase by Jean Baudrillard (“The Art Complot”) but which constantly hammers and  unchains in me encountered feelings and doubts about the reach  of my perception; it allows me to value the attitude and the mentioned doing,  since  Laura Benchetrit is far away  from the superficial, the insipid and the obvious.

The critics named coincide when referring to an inevitable association with oriental  mysticism. Sun Kio-tïng, a maestro of taoistic aesthetics, says there are three periods in the practice of calligraphy, and consequently in painting. I believe that Laura Benchetrit is in her third period,  wherein  “she has put all her resources in order, to join them in a simple style and easy appearance. And here we are, on the summit of artistic achievement.”.

March 2010
Laura Feinsilber
Member of the Argentine Association of Art Critics

"Parts of a Whole"

Teatro Argentino,La Plata

… Benchetrit, the artist uses geometry to experiment with space from the perspective of the plane and the fragment. Her perspective on the experiments of the Argentine avant-gardes allows us to delve into a peculiar research on the possibilities offered by the geometric abstract language, without falling into excessive rationalization. The textures and brush traces enrich the plane, and lay stress on the idea of a new abstraction vision, linked to the experimental dynamism of our epoch.

Rosa Faccaro
Magenta Art Magazine, October 2009

Everything seems to fly over the surface. Like a cloud of gold dust blown by an alchemist’s chubby cheeks. Until that surface is cut by a straight line, with geometric angles that put the shapeless chaos in order. This is the dialogue produced by the new series of paintings and object-pictures created by Laura Benchetrit.  Her works of medium size format conjugate blurry undefined colors with the rigor of straight lines.

It is not difficult to associate this work to the tradition of oriental painting and its western mediators; it distinguishes from them by the diluted gesture on the surface she alternates with powerful gestures in graphics. There are significant changes in her last production, maybe influenced by her latest incursions in engraving.

That blurry thickness of color, that which evoked the atmosphere of a William Turner, the chromatic haiku which characterized her paintings today faces a new spatial dimension that does not have to do with the virtual space of the representation, but rather with the soundness of what is real. The pictorial support, the panels, is superimposed in an order that can alternate between symmetry and asymmetry, or between an octagonal disposition and a freer one. This superposition of  panels, the sum of surfaces resemble the accumulation of minute steps in a pyramid that was never construed, and the picture turns into a thin object that can be related to the start of a mock up like those made by the artists of constructivism or the Russian supremacy. Laura grants peculiar importance to the intermediate spaces, as in Sombra Secreta (Secret Shadow), a piece where the plane that interrupts the continuity among the other planes, occupies an uncommon leading role. Not less significant are the negative spaces, the drilling of the surface of the picture by polygon geometric forms. These polygons, (usually with four angles) cut the panels through and become portals to a secret darkness, a chromatic infra world that the viewer can slightly guess. These “holes” remind us of the importance of vacuum proclaimed by Lao Tsé in his Tao Te King: “with earth are the made pots but the utility of the pots depend on their emptiness; to build a house doors and windows must be made; and those empty openings are what allow to use it”. The doors and windows that Laura incorporates to her works precipitate us onto a metaphorically infinite zone, the “behind the picture”, provoking a sensation of secret curiosity. The disposition of some planes, partially covering the “holes” predisposes us to think of a semi hidden access, as if she invited us in, although with a certain ill feeling. In previous works, Laura would immerse us in the womb of a storm of color; in this new series she builds a bridge between two well defined dimensions, between a universe that is unpredictably unfolded and a reasoning that orders it through geometry and the straight line, a link between the immediately visible and the adjacent invisible. The poetic titles: Geometry of light, Secret shadow or Unbearable lightness, confirm the intention of showing a reality that is somewhat difficult to compr, almost a paradox between that which is in itself and this which we can perceive.

Laura Benchetrit shows an unusual kinship with the English artist William Turner. I think of it when going over her latest works such as “Temeratte”-  or even more so- “Rain, steam and speed” where a steam machine goes through a bridge.It little matters that Turner has a certain figurative identity and that Benchetrit is absolutely abstract. Art has nothing to do with these differences, in the same vein, we do not say Mozart’s Magic Flute is more or less music than any of his symphonies. Art has to do with the quality addressed to what someone called the intelligent eye, the eye that thinks. Let’s not forget that out of all our senses the eye has the greatest number of ramifications within the brain.

Laura Benchetrit wanders back and forth through warm or cold shades. Her colors blur, mingling with the freedom of water. Except for some or other pastel-crayons on paper, Laura shows her greatest talent with water-color paintings on paper, one of the means explored by Turner.

The meaningful titles of her works imply life experiences that the artist traduces into plastic equivalences: “Deep Love”, “Passing Love”, “Lightened Purple, “Through a Tear” and thus,   diverse subjective emotions can be turned into objects by this creator granting them the citizenship of beauty.

An exhibit worth admiring.  

Rafael Squirru, 2003

An evanescent color

Color rules each and every one of Laura Benchetrit’s works, an intermediate generation artist with rare refinement in compositional approach.

Minimum gesture traces animate the surfaces where color poses itself with strength, in minimum scales, and produces evanescent effects which – as a final conclusion for the eye- have nothing to do with weakness.

A beautifully thought-out exhibit, as a series of ideas that had been placed in order.

Albino Dieguez Videla
La Prensa, April 27th., 2003.

Serene Communicability

The watercolors, temperas, pastel-crayons and combined techniques that the artist Laura Benchetrit presents in this exhibit, integrate an expressive unit that allows appreciating it as one great work open to different variations of the same concept.

These works remind us of Cézanne’s principle “color makes the shape”, because the artist develops her creativity from the standpoint of the perceptive qualities of color, which she senses with marked intensity.  Paper support contributes to its development within an atmospheric expression with no figurative dependence nor references, nor any other image resource.

In such a way, Laura Benchetrit achieves subtle and refined atmospheres proper of a sensitive captivation that grasps the essential, clear of any secondary element. She thus creates a space for serene reflection and encountering the world inside.  That is the reason why in her works there is an inevitable association with oriental mysticism.

Without any turbulence-causing gestures, nor resorting to the powerful attraction of matter- which in her case tends to be diluted and almost evanescent- the artist endows her works with undeniable mystery, taking us onto the grounds of ambiguity, an attribute of truthful artistic creation, and of the unreachable. Everything is like suggested, claiming absences and offering through the climate reached a possibility for spiritual encounter.

The predominant vision is harmonious and serene, as an appeal to the order of the cosmos and to the existential paradigmatic communion with it that mankind can aspire. The artist presents it as a search that she seems to start in each work, in a different manner, according to the chromatic scale employed.

Her works register different moods, moments when the soul situates before the universe, legitimately aspiring that thirst for the absolute we all have in the deepness of our being. The artist’s capacity reveals itself in the possibility to communicate what is personal raising it to a more universal scale, in such way to share it with the rest. This   transference of lived experiences, where the most profound identities can be found, holds the convoking power of art.  Laura Benchetrit makes it reality.
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Fermín Fevre
Buenos Aires, March 2003

The first individual exhibit of Laura Benchetrit is promising, since it demonstrates the seriousness with which she approaches the difficult treatment of watercolor and tempera.

The forms of a lyrical abstraction communicate intimate feelings that could be related to certain literary texts and to the paintings of the celebrated French informalist George Mathieu.

Albino Dieguez Videla, 2001

Imagination, orderly chaos, a glance towards the Orient, abstraction, improvisation…

The paintings that Laura Benchetrit presents today speak softly about her significant contribution; dispensing with everything complex so that only what is simple and genuine remains. In this way, she succeeds in turning us spectators into participants…

Her desire to see and to know leads to her emotional memory, where she finds the forms that compose her work.

Her need to create takes her in the end to a clear objective; her liberation.

Rómulo Sidañez, 2001

The brush stroke and the synthesis of Laura Benchetrit takes us towards the Orient: this is her identity, and the essence of her search.

Her color is strong and yet very pure, her palette is rich in transparencies, the white in the background is treated as color…

Her watercolors are quite far from academic technique; her use of water and transparency leads us to a very special spiritual state. Thankfully, today we can enjoy the clarity of her work.

Her finely crafted temperas demonstrate once more that quality in art is not only in oil. Instead, creation is reached when sensitivity is allied with the appropriate material.

Baubeau de Secondigné, 2001