notebooks, pencil circumstances… How your black and white phrases have taken over our stationery cabinets

2024-06-05 12:31:45

Actor Ben died on Wednesday Might 5 in Good. He grew to become particularly identified for his well-known manuscripts in white on a black background that have been utilized first to work, then to workplace provides.

“I signed as a result of I’m”, “every thing shouldn’t be black or white”, “in the future after one other”… Artist Ben, standard by his well-known titles in white on a black background placed on every kind issues, we see. He died in his dwelling in Good on Thursday, the fifth of June. He’s 88 years outdated.

It’s thanks to those brief tales and poems, written on the photographs proven within the best museums on this planet but additionally on pencil circumstances, notebooks or areas within the Benjamin’s stationery classes Vautier gained recognition within the late Nineteen Sixties.

“I wish to talk”

Of Swiss origin, Ben was born in Naples in 1935, he lived as a baby in Izmir, Turkey, and Alexandria, Egypt, earlier than arriving on the age of 14 in Good the place he nonetheless lives at present. Self-taught, the artist started his first creations within the mid-Fifties and labored with many members of the Good artwork scene corresponding to Yves Klein, Arman, and Martial Raysse.

Work by the artist Ben exhibited on the Mailol museum in Paris on September 6, 2016. © Bertrand Guay – AFP

If he was initially content material to mimic what he was doing on the time, like New Realism, Ben wished to develop his personal fashion. Whereas he was the proprietor of a report retailer in Good, he imagined his first writings which have been offered in his “retailer”, a murals in its personal proper that the Heart Pompidou purchased in 1977.

“I wish to talk, however I do not know the way to attract what I really feel, however I can write the phrases you say,” Ben confides on the microphoneEurope 1 in 2016.

The demise of Ben the artist: how his black and white phrases apply themselves to our day by day lives

Determine du Fluxus

Brief, punchy, provocative and humorous, Ben’s phrases multiply: “It’s a must to eat. It’s a must to sleep”, “All egos”, “I write due to this fact I’m”, “What is the level?”, “Writing in full textual content” …

To start with, the artist invited letter painters to create his works, “then I noticed that it is extremely costly. So I instructed myself that I’ll write in a format so that everybody can learn. Comprehensible,” he defined to Europe 1.

Then he developed a means of writing, virtually infantile, in letters hooked up to it, which he hooked up to the photographs. With its particular graphics, Ben’s writing will enable him to achieve fame till he turns into one of many figures of Fluxus in Europe.

The artwork motion born in New York targeted on the occasion and nature of the work, eliminating the viewer-creator relationship and humor that aimed to destroy aesthetic values.

Collaboration with Quo Vadis

Within the 90s, Benjamin Vautier additionally joined forces with the Quo Vadis {hardware} model and signed his well-known manufacturers on pens, notebooks, binders, luggage, pencil circumstances and different workplace provides.

This collaboration will give the artist nice success with a wide range of center and highschool college students, college students and adults, however above all it is going to give him monetary stability to have the ability to put himself for different duties.

“This collaboration not solely popularized his work however gave him a strategy to analysis artwork,” mentioned his daughter Eva in an interview with Sunday newspaper in 2020.

If Ben’s writing is acknowledged by the general public, this fame however represents a drawback for the artist. As a result of as you mentioned, by specializing in the fashion of your letters, folks miss the which means despatched by the textual content. He now confided within the column of JDD in 2020, discover it shameful to be identified “in your writing”, who needs “to be identified for the which means of what you write.”