Lot Essay
"Benanteur's painting, renewed year after year by his growing knowledge of museums, little by little gave up the discipline of stripping down, and gave itself up wholeheartedly, finding a new landscape, where he attained a certain form of beatitude, a kind of heavenly garden reconstituting by combining them, the thousand and one mornings of the world. Here, from one triptych to another, the figure is no more than a clue, a mark, indicating the measure of man's coming to grips with the world and its elements. An enchanted earth, no longer altered but bathed by the rising and setting sunlight, overrun by the coolness of rivers across the countryside, hiding its sources in the prairies' dense grass, and inside the mossy rocks of the dark and deep forests."(Raoul-Jean Moulin, 'Benanteur's own Imaginary', in Claude Lemand (ed.) Benanteur Volume 1: Paintings, Paris, 2002, p. 17)