Itzhak Goldberg, art critic and exhibition curator
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For theMontrouge Salon 2012

I observed that, in every position, the whole body of man is subordinate to the head which is the heaviest member of all,” writes Alberti. The Italian architect and theorist would have been embarrassed by the work of Olivia Benveniste. It's that the heads of
this artist does not belong to anyone. Not that they are unrecognizable or imaginary. Singular, they seem, despite their proliferation and despite their stereotypical treatment, to refer each time to a particular person. However, these faces, always detached from the body of their owner, are clearly autonomous.
The plastic composition further accentuates this effect of separation from any other surrounding element: confined to the middle of the sheet, isolated against a neutral background, “cut out”, the faces give off a sensation of frozen floating.
If the alliance between these two terms is close to an oxymoron, it is because Olivia's formal work combines two contradictory movements. On the one hand, the rejection of depth means that the weightless volumes are as if affixed to the sheet, without adhering to it. On the other hand, the bare shapes, the smooth epidermal texture, the clear and precise features, have a firm and inaccessible appearance. The effect is even more striking when the heads are positioned horizontally, with their faces facing upwards. These “elongated” faces, these “floating islands” (which the painter calls puddles) are reminiscent of recumbent figures who have lost their bodies. Or rather to death masks with smooth epidermis, these “objects of rigid material with which the human face is covered to transform its natural appearance” according to the dictionary. We also think of the Unknown Woman of the Seine, this legendary face of a young drowned woman, immortalized by Aragon in Aurélien.
In this silent work, no dialogue is possible with the “beings” represented by the artist. Turned inward or directed somewhere else with the babies, strangely
mature, located in medallions, the gaze of Olivia's characters never meets that of the viewer. In reality, our attention is primarily focused around the mouth, the liveliest part of the face. Half-open, sometimes marked by a discreet grimace or a grin, it introduces a series of expressions which contrast with the immobility of the face.
Can we talk about a series? The artist uses the term variations for her “blocks” of babies which, according to her, evokes “the gradient of gray present like a veil on each child's face”. Recently, sculptural figures of women have come to complete this anatomical universe whose disturbing power lies in the strange proximity between the organic and the mineral.

Quentin Verwaerde
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For the Regional 15 exhibition, Artothèque Strasbourg , 2014

Where does the impression of icy religiosity, of lymphatic prayer that arises from these chromatic variations come from? It would be difficult to say, as these cut-out faces, of which we do not know whether they are born, dissolve or stagnate, keep their world impermeable. Let us think of negative theology and its oxymorons: we are before a vast frozen movement, among silent cries: a note seems to be held despite the suffocation, and we look at these faces with blocked ears, full of an unknown noise. And what is this time that runs in the variations of colors? Could this be the motionless speed of the dead that Cocteau speaks of? If there is a gateway to the mystery, let us look for it in the curious expressiveness of the mouth and teeth: because the eye, which looks at nothing, is of no help; he is like a hand abandoned by sleep.

Laëtitia Bischoff, poet and art critic
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For the TK 21 magazine , March 2018

If I were a Curious woman with a piece of house dedicated to my remarkable finds, if my pockets were full and my time dedicated to devoting myself to them, I would include the works of Olivia Benveniste, Claudia Fontes, Pascale Klingelschmitt and Kate McGuire.
The work of these four women would offer me a glimpse of the world at its most notable, perhaps bizarre. And if the Curious of the past distinguished in the heart of their study the works of God from those of man, today this distinction is very vague and beware of anyone who ventures to draw some boundary. Moreover, the works of these four visual artists are surely the sign of life of a completely different universe which would be signified by snippets, by little bits of clues. Like signals catapulted from another civilization, like a treasure chest found in a stranded UFO. As such, the firm has always nourished as many legends as knowledge one by one back to back. So let's imagine that my knowledge is narrower than the needle's needle, that the world comes to me through these creations from which it is a question of drawing the thread, and that I must fill with speculations the edges of these images and these objects. Let us imagine that science has not yet made its bed in each of our brains, that it has not tamed our neural and visual patterns, that categories and arrangements are pure personal instincts. I let my imagination fill the hollows of my ignorance. My scenography, full of waves and rebounds, turns its back on coherence to find a harmony of microcosm.
The work, in every sense precious, of Olivia Benveniste has the clinical coldness of an archaeological restitution. He prostrates us before signs of feet and hips, extracts, it seems, of beings whose scales and materials I will invent. I will fill with textures and milkiness this white that the designer sculpts in reverse in the image of this black which drinks us between each star, each night. The possible or the complete, the clue or the complete description... Does Olivia Benveniste come from a universe devoid of context or is she the naturalist emissary of a kingdom?

Anne Guldner, art student and critic.
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Meeting proposal for the magazine Tête-à-tête , 2012

To bring back to the surface in us the individual (the true one) in latency. Stop confusing it and reducing it to
the egoist, who only cares about his personal interests and pleasures, disregarding those of others.
Imperatives to which the words of Dany-Robert Dufour echo:

“The true individual can in fact only designate the one who not only came out of all the
possible herds, but who also thinks and acts for himself independently of his impulses.
(...) ...Only the individual finally realized as a personality capable of self-government, concerned with
the other and aware of its relative place in the universe, could still save a world that has become
sick of being fully delivered to the whole Market. »1

Awakening humanist values ​​evokes the possibility of thinking of ourselves as “hominants” rather than men.
This term allows us to reconsider our capacity for thought, construction and evolution
permed. Everything which, in short, makes us tend towards man, to become an individual.

The artist can be a specific example of this approach to the individual, today more than necessary,
salutary. By engaging in an artistic approach, he undertakes to be surprised, to question himself, to do and
assert a critical “I”. He tries, as anyone could, to untame himself so as not to adhere to the
contemporary ready-to-think.

By working between an “inside” and an “outside”, somewhere between himself and the other - the public - the artist
can reveal, become the relay of this humanist consciousness which must circulate, interfere in each
mind to realize itself.

This desire for a return to humanity, which calls into question the meaning of being in the world, is not so vague.
We can grasp its full content and concreteness in the encounter and dialogue with others.

Our desire to dialogue together and contribute to this Tête-à-tête review therefore begins here.
Because it is important to us to invest this vast territory of reflections, this vital space of consciousness,
not to miss the call.


1 The man who comes after liberalism , p 12, ed. Denoël, 2011.