Born in Marseille in 1963, Thierry Benenati is a sculptor. Fontenaisian artist, his fame is international.

After studying Applied Arts, he spent 20 years in Paris as creative director of artistic director in advertising agencies. For 10 years, he devoted himself to sculpture, pure artistic expression, his true nature. He regularly participates in the Grand Palais, or at the Salon d’Automne where he was vice-president and president of the sculpture section. In 2019, one of his works will enter an Italian museum attached to the city of Torgiano (Italy), a consecration.

The bronze…

Whether animalistic or not, the sculptures of Thierry Benenati reveal an invisible reality, a hidden truth of each subject, in the form of allegory, thanks to the symbolism. Before becoming bronzes, the originals are in plaster, iron and wax. It is in the greatest respect of the rules of art that his pieces reveal an authentic work of sculptor, created and then realized by the artist.

… and Steel

In his workshop in Rennes, Thierry Benenati also works iron as he does with the earth, but under the 1500 ° of his torch. The work of an original steel is more demanding and dangerous than the work of wax or plaster. Here everything is hard, cutting, heavy and extremely resistant. To make a steel work, then to chisel it, is a test of strength! But the final result, in its elegance and its movement, must make forget the rigor and the endurance that the work of this matter imposes.

To marry harmoniously classic and modern

My works forget neither the beautiful nor the living, nor light, nor space, nor even time.
It is outside of all modes or tendencies that I try to inscribe my work in a continuity of the history of the art and in the love of the great masters. My creations, resolutely surreal, always offbeat and mostly animal, betray my Italian origins in their sometimes baroque style: an expression that can be called symbolist-surrealist.

The witness sculpture of civilizations.

Primitive art; this is the source of the artistic creation of humanity. Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti, Modigliani, Brancusi … and more recently Bazelitz, Paladino, Barcelo or Ousseman Sow, and many others, all fed on these roots, be they Egyptian, Etruscan, Aztec, Mayan, African, Oceanian or Asian. Since the staging of Marcel Duchamps, we have seen 80 years glorify the concept rather than talent and know-how. Would not it be just a wink on 30,000 years of art? The crises have at least that good, is that they chase the superfluous and encourage us to find the fundamentals.

Historically, sculpture has been one of the privileged witnesses of the history of civilizations. From Africa to the West, the works, sometimes monumental, have always fascinated by the mastery of their authors. It is today part of a world where, since the direct cutting of stone or wood, materials and techniques are multiplying and we do not really know who does what and how.

But fortunately the public’s eye shows us that he will always be sensitive to the effects of shadows and lights on the forms, to the games of solids and voids, to the creativity and talent of Insuffler a spark of life that a work proposes to share with the visitor.

Richness of contemporary artistic production

For Thierry Benenati “the contemporary artistic production is fortunately more diverse and fertile than ever. But there is however an unjust split between moderns and classics. the former consider the classics obsolete and the latter accuse the moderns of neglecting mastery.

Most of my style tries to show that we can eventually find a line-union between the two.