Born in Naples in 1935, died in Nice in 2024. Artist from Nice, companion of the Fluxus movement and of the École de Nice, he makes writing (words in white…
Born in Naples in 1935, died in Nice in 2024. Artist from Nice, companion of the Fluxus movement and of the École de Nice, he makes writing (words in white acrylic on a black background) the heart of a body of work also made of gestures, performances and editions. Ben Vautier (1935–2024), a Franco-Swiss artist from Nice, better known under the single name Ben, is one of the major figures of European contemporary art and a historic companion of the Fluxus movement. From 1953 onwards, he made a radical choice: to replace the image with writing. “I have been making writings since 1958,” he recalls on one of his canvases. The gesture seems modest — a few words traced in white acrylic on a black background — yet it is in fact foundational. Where painting represents the world, the word asserts and declares it. For more than sixty years, writing remained at the heart of his work — on canvases, mirrors, façades, banners, postcards — without preventing an abundant body of work in performance, sculpture, theory, politics, publishing, installation, films and poetry. For Ben, the word is first and foremost an act. Écrire sur un mur , Tracer la ligne d'horizon turn writing into a gesture that takes possession of the world. And when he places a simple panel on a thermometer, a chair with a severed leg or a heap of pebbles, these everyday objects become La température , Le manque , Le tas . Naming is enough to turn a thing into a work — a legacy of Marcel Duchamp and the readymade, except that here the word alone performs the displacement. The word then becomes painting. On his canvases, recognisable at a glance, the writing takes on body: the sentence becomes mass, rhythm, colour. Mots ou peinture ? Ben asks — as if one had to choose. Yet his word-paintings have no need to choose: one reads them as one looks, one looks at them as one reads. Deliberately stripped down, they are never decorative; they are vehicles for ideas.
