Pascal Benichou Born in Provence, performed lead dances with The Chicago City Ballet, The San Francisco Ballet and The Joffrey Ballet. He was a guest Artist with The Metropolitan Opera, The Chicago Lyric Opera, The New York City Opera and The Erick Hawkins Dance Company. In February 1998 Mr. Benichou was the only male dancer to participate in The Olympics Opening Ceremonies in Nagano Japan.
As a choreographer Pascal has performed in festivals around the world and was critically acclaimed by The New York Time “ An innate blend of innocence and sophistication “ and by Backstage “Powerhouse tour de force……Startling originality “
In his current body of work. as a painter, Mr. Benichou expand the conversational possibilities of a performance onto the canvas where gestures and movements are measured in forms and colors and believing that beauty give no specific message other than itself. With a fascination for coexistence and harmony, his exploration centers on the balance between complexity and simplicity.
"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity". Charles Mingus.
"True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new." – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art to see your soul." – George Bernard Shaw.
Pascal Photography work is represented at The Phatory New York City
The HUDSON Review Vol. LXI, No. 4 Winter 2009) Copyright 2009
KAREN WILKIN
.Pascal Benichou's "Of Spirit and Matter," photographs and videos, at The Phatory. Benichou
deals with the equivocal and the uncanny; …he stakes out an unstable terrain between the recognizable and
the otherworldly. Until recently, Benichou was known primarily as a gifted, versatile dancer and, in a very
real sense, the works in "Of Spirit and Matter" were a series of performance pieces. In each of them, a
beautiful naked man-Benichou himself, displaying his long-limbed, muscular dancer's body-moved
through verdant New England woods, rolling down hills, climbing up inclines, clambering on rocky
outcroppings, changing positions in a shallow, rocky stream. The still photos presented several images of the
protagonist at once, with some portions of each pale-fleshed figure blurred into near-transparency and others
more sharply focused, against a crisply defined landscape of gray rocks, brown leaf mold, and green leaves.
Sometimes the bodies were pressed together; at others, they formed disjunctive sequences. Surprisingly, the
multiple views result neither from repeated exposures nor manipulation of the digital images, but are records
of Benichou's carefully timed movements, captured by long exposures. Experience and dancer's discipline
allow him to calculate (more or less) the appropriate speed of movement from position to position required
to achieve the desired effect of clarity or transparency, continuity or separation, in the final image- hence
the notion of performance. In "Of Spirit and Matter," the blurring and multiplicity, combined with the nudity,
cancelled the usual "slice of actuality" connotations of the photograph and moved us, instead, into the realm
of the fantastic. Yet, at the same time, we were reminded of the early days of photography: nineteenth-
century tableaux that attempted to look like paintings, and "spirit" photographs that purported to reveal the
invisible mysteries of the afterlife.
In the videos, Benichou's methods became explicit. Continuous loops documented sequences in which he
rolled down a slope and climbed back up, passing another version of himself, similarly engaged, and so on, as
if revealing the intermediate stages of the still images. The resulting crowd of ghostly, Sisyphean figures
moved endlessly, each in a slightly different, but elegant, way, each along a slightly different route. Yet
Sisyphean isn't the right word. There was no visible evidence of effort; and though we sensed the prickly
reality of the setting, the trans- lucent nudes were oblivious to scratchy twigs and rough rocks. Absorbed in
their repetitive actions, barely defined against the landscape, they were both literally and metaphorically
disembodied. What's most arresting about Benichou's images is the way they obviously depend on
contemporary technology but evoke an unexpected range of art historical precedents, from flashes of
Michelangelo's tumbling nudes in his Last Judgment to the Pre-Raphaelites; the rocky stream in which
Benichou moves with improbable ease suggested Gustave Courbet's vigorous landscapes, and more. The
Phatory, a tiny "alternative" gallery on East gth Street, near Tompkins Square Park, has been a reliable
showcase of the provocative and unexpected since its inception. Benichou's "Of Spirit and Matter" continued
that tradition.