Painter Artist
Benoît Galifer
Montpellier, France
“Inflorescence 7”
The artist
Journey
René Benoît Galifer was born in 1944 in Arles, a nurturing city deeply steeped in culture and tradition. As early as high school, he came into contact with painting thanks to Théo Rigaud, drawing teacher at the lycée and a known painter... though belatedly recognized. Despite an early artistic sensitivity that earned him at age 16 a first prize in drawing at a Youth Festival organized by the city and briefly made him consider an artistic career, his choices led him in 1963 to embark at the faculty of Montpellier on the long curriculum of medical studies that would make him a recognized academic, professor of pediatric surgery and department head at the university hospital. A brilliant and demanding journey in contact with sick or malformed children that would end in 2012, rich with an unforgettable human experience accumulated at the cost... of half a century without painting!
About
The Artist
After 50 years of separation to live in Montpellier another adventure that would make him an academic pediatric surgeon, Benoît Galifer finds painting again as a former but always demanding mistress.
Settled in his personal studio, he devotes most of his free time to reactivating this long-thwarted passion that has resurfaced like an underground spring whose existence he had almost forgotten. Completely self-taught and without academic training - both a strength and weakness - he attempts to find the language of a painting of percept, not concept, halfway between figuration and abstraction. The main difficulty he had to face was ridding himself of the formatting imposed by the practice of 50 years of surgery, an activity often said to resemble an art when it is quite the opposite in terms of the freedom and improvisation it never allows. His main sources of inspiration are the interpretation of the 4 symbolic elements of nature, water, air, fire and earth, as well as the landscapes of the Pays d'Arles where he was born and Languedoc where he now lives.
“He rediscovers painting like a former and ever-demanding mistress. But she has not aged while enriching herself with new experiences... and attempting to reconquer her remains an effort of every moment.”
Benoît Galifer
Portfolio
