Photos-souvenirs

“Benoît Grimalt imposes a game on himself: to reconstruct through drawing the last photograph of a film before its development. Several drawn attempts allow him to capture his doubts, hesitations, and omissions. If the photo fixes a situation, the drawing allows for adjustments: a slightly different framing, another position. The drawing thus shows what the image could have been a few moments later (…).
With this work, Benoît Grimalt questions the relationship between the image and memory. The photography contributes to the construction of this last one, with these images which deliver the testimony of forgotten moments (…). By resorting to drawing, he further refines the motifs he wishes to remember, leaving behind the superfluous and the inevitable dross. One day, a visitor told the artist that it was certainly “the image more than the photograph” that interested him. He was probably not wrong: through photography or drawing, Benoît Grimalt enriches above all a personal collection, an ideal album of images dedicated to beautiful things.

Marylène Malbert

Excerpts from the article “Benoît Grimalt, le photographe et ses crayons,” published in Facettes magazine, November 2014.