CONTEMPORARY ART
The floor of the abbey church is bare.
The building has been reduced to its essential element: its foundation.
This outer structure emerging humbly from the earth is literally a fundamental memory.
It is a raw and radical palimpsest of the past: the ultimate vestige.
But in this outline is also a sort of promise.
It preserves the possibility of rebuilding.
It is an invitation to architectural, spiritual, intellectual and energetic elevation.
Archaeologists have been able to provide us with a virtual image of the abbey on paper and on a screen.
A sculpture can, in turn, physically conjure absent volumes, forgotten proportions and buried architecture.
A few steel rods, like pencil strokes, are all that is required to lead the eye and prompt the mind to fill in the blanks.
The entire building takes shape in the space through the power of our imaginations.
FB.
Born in 1973 in the Forez Mountains, Francis Benincà built bubble houses with his father as a teenager.
He learned the language of curves, volume, and forms and their properties.
Around age 40, after creating and working in various cultural organisations (live music cafés, live entertainment companies and festivals), he returned to the techniques of building metal structures.
He mastered them, bent them to his purposes, breathed new life into them and turned them to sculpture.
Around 12 years ago, Benincà put his roots down in Central Brittany, acquired a large studio in the countryside and began to create monumental sculpture for sites throughout France and abroad.
