Benoît Barbagli Vautier

He sets off to climb mountains to offer them flowers from his own hand. He runs into the seawater to sing a piece on the trumpet, soon submerged by the flow of the waves. Gestures that one might think absurd if they didn't emerge with a powerfully poetic, sensory energy. To the eco-anxiety born of global warming, Benoît Barbagli Vautier responds with the jubilation of art as a means of survival. Coming from the new generation of Villa Arson graduates, the son of gallery owner Eva Vautier carries this unifying vision to which the essential Ben contributed so much. "I owe a lot to my grandfather; he had a very complex relationship with ego, and I try to overcome this notion through the collective," Benoît says spontaneously. While Ben spoke a lot about ego, he also invited so many other artists to show their work in his exhibitions. Similarly, at the major parties organized today by his grandson at the Villa Anna in Nice, a large part of the Côte d'Azur art world gathers to share friendships, for a warm moment around performances and exhibitions. These evenings are filled with the excitement of the encounters.

Meetings between the living and AI

In his artistic explorations, Benoît Barbagli Vautier likes to play with the limits of art. The first preconceived idea he gently challenges, without ever resorting to denunciation: a work can only have one author. With Aimée Fleury, an ecofeminist who graduated from the Pavillon Bosio in Monaco, he creates duo works like his Chrysalites. Surrounded by his group of friends from the Palam collective, he rediscovers the nakedness of contact with nature in photographs taken with a drone, between swimming in the turquoise water of the Mediterranean and dancing in the mountains around the fire. Images that he then reworks using AI to erase the bodies in the living, through a farandole of pixels. "I like this individual withdrawal within a collective process, the erasure of bodies in movement to make it a purely formal moment, driven by ecological issues," comments the visual artist, who grew up in contact with the living when his parents were goatherds.

Bronze jewelry in fractals

"I was a teenager when I started coding, and now I can also rely on ChatGPT. AI is both a collective friend and enemy, bringing together all of humanity's knowledge," he comments. The Great B-noïd programmed by Benoît, the viewer can co-create a work with AI, accompanied by a fictional art critique and a letter of introduction addressed to a museum. A work that obviously tickles the artist's status, and does so with a smile on his face. Using mathematical formulas, the visual artist – who created a Fablab combining contemporary creation and artisanal know-how – uncovers jewelry whose forms refer as much to the organic as to the digital and 3D printing. Driven by the idea that art is life – dear to Fluxus and its ancestor – Benoît Barbagli Vautier brings out above all what makes it positive: "If creation is what makes life more interesting than art, then meaning is everywhere and art is for me a pretext for joy."