L'épaisseur de la nuit, 2025

Benjamin Carbonne   Emerging artists

Benjamin Carbonne was born in 1970 in Saint-Martin d'Hères in the Isère. A self-taught artist, he starts making art at the age of 20 and gets to express the things that bother him, sometimes his own violence, that of the others or of the world and finally to make place in himself for something else.

The artist often represents tormented beings, he focuses on the faces that are sometimes soft and sensitive, but also tortured or distorted by pain, screaming, the need for expression. In 2004 he created with poet and painter Antonio Rodriguez Yuste the contemporary art studio "Interférences", later joined by Stéphane Carbonne (sculptor, painter, singer).

Some particular works are at the origin of the Carbonne's evolution: in 2007, the completion of a 50-meter long mural at the Rivesaltes camp gives new meaning to his approach and drives him to assert his "place" as an artist in history; in 2009 he gets a commission for a "Pieta" which will push him to experiment a different treatment of the body.

After having reached with great intensity the expression of what could be most alive and raw in himself and in humanity, Benjamin makes a shift that comes naturally, working on other bodies or faces, revealing all their power in a contrast of depths and lightness, of pictorial clarification and spaces of fantasy.

Find this artist and many more in our collection of works by Somber Portrait Painters.