Roger Boubenec
Born in 1955.
French · Contemporary art · figurative painting and a poetics of water
Roger Boubenec has developed a contemporary painting practice centred on water, light, and the transformation of colour. His experience as a professional diver in the French Navy is a decisive source for his visual imagination: immersion becomes a space for observing the gradual fading of light and the persistence of blue.
His research, which he calls “hydric poetry,” takes shape in watercolour, oil painting, monotype, and collage. Pigment flows, plant impressions, projections, and salt crystallisations contribute to a vocabulary of transparency and sedimentation, in which painted matter retains the movement of fluids.
Portraits, figures, animals, seascapes, and diving imagery recur in work attentive both to human presence and to natural forces. Oil paintings, at times conceived as visual narratives, stand alongside large-scale watercolours that are often extended through poetic texts.
Working in the Toulon area, Boubenec teaches watercolour at the Centre culturel Peiresc and has exhibited in several cultural venues in the Var, including the Maison du Patrimoine in Six-Fours-les-Plages. He has also developed the “Travail à 4 mains” project with his son Vincent, bringing collage and watercolour together through layered compositions. Transparence, the oil painting presented by Swiss Art Gallery, belongs within this body of work.
The works by Roger Boubenec presented by Swiss Art Gallery extend this artistic journey and take their place naturally within this corpus.
