Benjamin Déguénon — Galerie Robert Vallois — Critique — Slash Paris

Trained under Dominique Zinkpé, the Beninese artist Benjamin Déguénon (born in 1982) creates a bestiary of chimeras at the Robert Vallois Gallery, blending spirituality and fantasy, marked by the sheer pleasure of the creative act.

Benjamin Déguénon — Le Traversé @ Vallois Gallery from February 6 to March 1. Learn more His exhibition Le Traversé presents a collection of small-format pieces whose variety and wealth of discoveries both enchant and unsettle, balancing simplicity with depth. From drawing to ceramics, Déguénon’s creations reflect the fertility of a free imagination that intertwines eras and places, all connected by an essential relationship with the earth—both the medium of his works and the foundation of the world he inhabits, shaped by contradictions.

This almost paradoxical confrontation—between mythological figures and personal experience, between natural and urban elements—might thus serve to illuminate the ambivalence of a dream world that, while evoking childhood, does not conceal its scars. Amid warm primary colors, the softness of materials, and the unsettling distortions of expressions, unnatural juxtapositions of organs and machines give way to anthropomorphic representations, evoking grafts that seem to define our multiple nature. Leaving interpretation open-ended, the multiplication of “selves” (sometimes in stacked forms reminiscent of humanity’s tragic episodes) raises as many questions as the “gaps” that characterize them.

At times colorful figurines, at others surfaces for additional figures, his creations play with contrasts of material and form to depict life forces in constant tension, their dimensions ever-shifting. Diagonals proliferate, as if trunks were trying to break free from their supports, beings from their conjoined forms, striving to assert their possible existence.

Between amputation and augmentation, between absence and excess, Déguénon’s bestiary thus translates a vision balanced much like the realm of imagination—anchored in the spirit of adventure and the boldness of fantasy, taming the hardness of the world.