French artist Ben Arpea lives and works in Paris. Born into a family of art lovers and collectors, Ben Arpea has been immersed in a rich artistic universe since childhood, where he began to create, draw and paint.
Ben Arpea gained recognition in 2020 with a series of paintings in which he developed a singular artistic language made of geometric abstraction evolving towards the semi-figurative, using flat areas of color and texture. He pays tribute to the figures of modern and contemporary art that he admires – Tom Wesselmann, David Hockney, Jonas Wood, André Breton – and is fully part of a new generation of creators from art, design and fashion, celebrating color and material in a simple and immediate relationship with the times.
Ben Arpea always draws his inspiration from suspended moments, gleaned from his travels. The Mediterranean, in particular, through its culture and aesthetics, is a continuous source of inspiration, and becomes an element of reference in a fundamental research around color and matter. Color is central in Ben Arpea’s painting. Vivid flat tints, finely textured, offer a dream-like vision, ideal, inviting us to reflect on our relationship with our environment, notably through the prism of social networks.
Ben Arpea creates and paints in a singular atmosphere where the manual and sensory approach is of essential importance. Ben Arpea chooses the fabric – jute or linen canvas, which allows for a better distribution of the material – and stretches the canvas on the frame himself. From sketches, he works the material and the color, mixes the paint with mineral elements, sand, pebbles, then deploys his pictorial language on a large scale, the minimalism of the motifs confronting the large format of the canvas. Beyond their pictorial immediacy, the works of Ben Arpea are imbued with mystery: from minimal geometric forms, the artist lets us glimpse the trace of a human passage, and shows moments inhabited by the man who has now disappeared, suggested but never present.
