Benjamin Huynh  is a multidisciplinary visual artist currently residing and working in Brussels, Belgium. Their artistic journey began in 2015 when they left their native region, Côte d’Azur, to pursue their artistic education in Toulouse and later at the Graphic Research School (ERG) in Brussels. Benjamin’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation and textiles. His work seeks to destabilize the traditional boundaries of painting while playing with its historicity.  He explores and traverses diverse themes such as queer identities, selfie culture and the positive approach to space.

In the complex landscape of contemporary painting, traditional boundaries are being challenged by concepts such as network painting and transitive painting, which encourage a re-evaluation of the historical hierarchical structure of the medium. Benjamin Huynh’s work is part of this transformation, exploring the potential of painting in a horizontal, interconnected paradigm. Horizontality becomes a central node through which his work examines concepts of Care, inclusion and soft activism intertwined with contemporary queer political issues. These notions function as essential survival strategies in late capitalism, and give rise to the proposal for BIP 2024.  

The works presented here start from collaborations with friends to generate source materials, in particular selfies, an approach that aims to be positive and question the representation of bodies. In this way, painting serves as a tool for traversing image worlds, oscillating here between the history of Western figurative painting and 21st-century self-representation through photography. Re-examining traditional aesthetics and gender assignments, Benjamin Huynh’s work actively involves the people painted in a horizontal relationship with the artist.

This proposal brings together painting and the question of device, with the works resisting their conventional sanctification through a positive approach to space. Textile work and installation become tools for freeing oneself from the canvas, while redefining museography and the exhibition as a place of passage. Figurative painting disrupts distance-object interaction, culminating in installations where work and viewers converge.

At the heart of this exploration is a sprawling approach, weaving together contemporary themes of interconnection, privacy and self-representation. Reference images derived from selfies serve as a channel for exploring identity, the embodiment of bodies and the impact of the digital age on self-expression. Benjamin Huynh’s practice is therefore not conceived as a series, but rather as a collection of interconnected objects, each engaging in a dialogue with the others. These are pieces that interact and, like a rhizome, proliferate.