Karine Benvenuti

 Ceramic sculptor Karine Benvenuti's work is firmly rooted in the art of our time. From ceramics, she retains the essential, the specific: the material, the gestures, and more generally the movements and actions of the body at work, the colorations -those of the material, and those, reduced to a minimum, of the colorants- and the management of fire. Retain the essential: in other words, get rid of the anecdotal, the pleasing, the seductive, the immediately utilitarian. Retain the essential to participate in a redefinition, or re-foundation, of ceramics. Retain the essential, as if to reach the moment and the place, the utopia of an origin.
Karine Benvenuti's ceramics come from before the wheel, working on mass, or in mass production, in search of a form's anteriority, or that "genetic" moment when a form begins to emerge, where no form seemed to appear. Ceramics - earth - as the place of origin of forms, the territory of archetypes. Karine Benvenuti's works bear no "trace" of the body's action. Each is the definitive and definitively right form of a dream of harmony: and this form is successful when it reflects back to us the image of a desire, and digs into us, at the same time as the frustration of satisfying it, the permanence of the desire. 
Karine Benvenuti's works don't catch the eye - they draw it in, as do those "found stones", the suiseki, which reveal themselves to the attentive walker and which the Far East has turned into an art form, or those, perhaps, which are the origin of the aboriginal Churingas. They have that improbable evidence of the facts of nature that attention, work or meditation can charge with humanity and culture to make them viatic for today's journeys. " 
Raphaël Monticelli
Writer, art critic.