How do you talk about the man of all men, “Ecce Homo”, not the son of God crucified on the cross but the third millennium man in his place crucified by the pains of our inhumane humanity.

How do you express the inexpressible, the chaos, the absurd, life, death and suffering. Benoit Maurin-Ducolibri is painting and in his painting you find this suffering and agony everywhere. As Marc Lebot states about Bacon “every painting is a body in itself and the act of painting is the process of stripping it to its naked state, to its death, through vomiting or rape, of which the body is the symbol”.

CHAOS AND NON COMMUNICATION

For Benoit Maurin-Ducolibri painting is a pressing necessity. His method is irrational but is meant to be. It is about using the body, its self being and its representation in space, because the body is where the suffering is, emitting, transmitting and ejecting. With violence running through it, reaching the affect, the body allows the desire to occur.
Naked, rid off its rags and desocialised, it returns to its biological nature, indulging in Dionysos like trances and Saturnian and Bachanalian orgies.
Referred to as a desalienating tool, it just IS, over expressive and assuming its double function of instrument and guinea pig.

In the background, there is a compact, haggard and overwhelmed crowd witnessing the termination of its own destiny. On each of these paintings the paint “tears” drip all over the surface, spreading a protective curtain fending them off from the unbearable reality of life. As Bacon explains, “we always live our existence behind screens, behind a coloured cloud and I think that when people tell me that my works appear violent, I perhaps have been able sometimes to lift one or two of these clouds”. Benoit Maurin-Ducolibri talks about a “cultural cloud” but the approach is identical.

With his latest picture “Christ’s last walk” the artist finds a new approach to occupy the surface. The cross, the structure of the representative space, introduces, with the use of lines and perspective, a depth in the background prone to the narration. The Christ, or rather the man in him, the one who carries his cross, is reconciled with himself or at least with a post-humanistic vision of his existence registered in the academicism of the posture. But disaster looms and the other mutilated body with ripped off arms, fixed in an “absolute present” is there, pulling the strings of destiny. The balance is precarious, the face tilted backwards shows a fascinated look, prisoner of the history we are forbidden to see, the history of man sick with this world, sick with himself. Disaster, then what? “The wind is picking up! We must try to live” Paul Valérie expresses herewith an essential truth. ATTEMPTING isn’t this the vital principal of the act, the act of painting and creating. DARING, BELIEVING, NEVER FEARING TO DOUBT is what Benoit Maurin-Ducolibri asserts.

Head and shoulders portraits could best describe the “Drag-Queen sucker girl”, with its significant title which invokes despair and an ironic fatality. Red, white and black are the only primary colours used in the picture; the crimson tint pushes two bodies to the surface, entwined and in penetration. The sketched lines, the hallucinated look held in a brutal confrontation, disproportionate limbs and the bloody paint “tears”, all the tragedy is expressed through the minimalistic use of materials.
In “Family Concept”, the solitude extends the idea of fatality, but by their simple presence the bloody “tears” mark the body territory, making opaque a background covered in the scriptures-like signs of our destiny: gaping wide open mouth screaming the impossible escape of a world hidden behind appearances.

From portraits to people in action, the idea is the same: make the representation reach the conscience, go to the end of our imagination, up to the limits of the imaginable under the impulse of our senses and into what Artaud calls “the passion’s palpitations”. Immerse oneself in the painting in order to bring out the impossible image and showing man as the embodiment of the idea of himself (therefore of others) in permanent transformation.
For Benoit Maurin-ducolibri it is about a “mise en Abyme” these century’s crises. It is based on the postulate of the misdeed and the original sin as well as on the Baudelarian concept of the “lost man”.
In the same way, the “nurses waltz” shows the self regenerating character caught in a frenetic dance driven by a concentric movement; the man, pregnant with his own life and giving birth to himself in a drunken “dionysiac” state, regains, with the exaltation of the horror, faces belonging to the mythological sphere.

The outrageous malformation of these monstrous and distorted bodies, as well as the obscene character of their attitudes and grotesque expressions overtake the signification of the picture, referring to Otto Dix and George Grosz imaginary or even to the Viennese actionist Heimann Nittsch.

What then could be said about this other scene called “the crèche” in which the man is trapped in an impossible vision of himself by the Christ like triad, revisited by the disasters linked to sexual practices. Under high protection, the penis, seen as an instrument of death, spreads on the outside its inner sterile substance, which is imprisoned in a condom, making useless any attempt to impregnate the earth. Imprisoned in his bubble, the aged child, the effigy of a symbolic figure, is soaking in the seminal fluid. On one side an inner body, the result of a fantasy, is questioning his own experience; on the other side external bodies, busy, trying to meet, marking each other with their own blood, the blood of all the acts of violence.