Sculpture by Damien Bénéteau, Circular Variations (Silver), 2025. Image courtesy of Buysse Gallery. © Damien Bénéteau. All rights reserved.
New Artwork Release: Damien Bénéteau
Circular Variations
Damien Bénéteau's sculptural practice operates at the intersection of mechanical precision and perceptual ambiguity. Oscillating between movement and stillness, form and atmosphere, his work reconfigures space into a field of optical tension. A central aspect of his research is the viewer's perception-how vision is activated, staged, even choreographed.
Bénéteau's kinetic constructions, notably the Variations series, engage in a dialogue with Alexander Calder-not by echoing the mobile's playfulness, but through the balance of forces. Calder's legacy, in this reading, is not formal but structural: the use of suspension as a compositional tool and the equilibrium between weight, light, and spatial distribution. Bénéteau's sculptures, often minimal in appearance, conceal a calibrated interplay of elements-circular forms, magnetic axes, anodised surfaces-that hover between design and void.
There is also a proximity to James Turrell, particularly in Bénéteau's reliefs and light-based sculptures. But where Turrell immerses the viewer in total optical environments, Bénéteau inscribes light into matter. His wall-based works, often made of anodised aluminium, use concavity, gradients, and light-induced depth to render the surface unstable. The result is not illusion, but a phenomenological shift-perception becomes event. His Circular Variations, with its silver metallic hue, for example, does not represent light; it performs it. It suggests an eclipse or a scientific lens, without ever offering narrative or metaphor.
Bénéteau's language is stripped of ornament, but never of resonance. What appears austere reveals, upon encounter, a sensory choreography. The minimalism is not reductive-it is measured. Through a refined calibration of geometry, magnetism, and light, he creates a grammar of silence, an invitation to attentiveness. In this sense, Bénéteau belongs to a lineage of artists who redefine the viewer's position-not merely as spectator, but as sensor.
