A new exhibition brings all the exuberance and vitality of Los Angeles to the Croisette
In many ways, Carole Benzaken’s first monographic exhibition at Cannes’ La Malmaison is a homecoming. The Grenoble-born painter left France in 1997 for Los Angeles, where she found a spiritual and artistic home for seven years. After returning to France, with some unfinished canvases in tow, she went on to become one of the most celebrated painters of her generation.
But only standing at the windows during a visit to Cannes’ contemporary art centre, and overlooking the palm tree-lined beach of the Mediterranean Sea, triggered something that recalled California strongly enough to unlock what Paris never could: she finally finished the three incomplete paintings. And 24 years after first starting them, these are now at the centre of her exhibition “Jam Session” at the very same venue that inspired her to do so.
Video via Ta Ville Ta Vie on YouTube
Drawing their titles Slauson, E Hyde Park Bvd and 67th St, from streets in the South Central district of L.A., these three canvases were begun during an intense period of immersion in one of the world’s most visually overwhelming cities. Benzaken painted on the floor, filmed through her car windscreen at night driving around, absorbed the light, the scale, the jazz culture, the relentless visual intensity of a place where, as she put it, everything was wide open and no hierarchy existed between mediums. Los Angeles gave her practice a new physical urgency; it also, apparently, left questions she was not yet ready to answer in paint. And strangely enough, it took the peaceful, chic, urbane Croisette of all places to finally provide the right conditions.
Around those three works, Jam Session assembles around 135 paintings, drawings and videos spanning more than three decades of Benzaken’s practice. The structure takes its logic from the title: works from different periods are grouped not chronologically but by visual and emotional affinity, the way musicians in a jam session build variations on a shared theme. Each floor of La Malmaison offers a different take on the same preoccupations – another angle, another attempt to hear what the material is saying. Rooms revise each other. The exhibition accumulates meaning as one moves through it.
I bowa 8, 2012 | Technique Mixte | 58 x 82 x 5 cm | Adagp, Paris 2026
@ David Bordes, Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris / Bruxelles
(Éclats) Forteresse, 2024 | Encre de Chine et acrylique sur toile | 200 x 170 cm
© Carole Benzaken, Adagp 2026, cliché David Bordes, Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris / Bruxelles
Benzaken’s central subject is the life cycle of images: how they travel through culture, how they degrade and transform in transit, and what survives the journey. Her painted surfaces absorb fragments of contemporary visual life: cinema, photography, the ceaseless output of screens, worked over, layered and partially effaced until what remains hovers at the threshold of recognition. Much of her work appears out of focus, with a sense of rush, but are a true reflection of life and energy itself. It was in Los Angeles that she described the ambition most directly: “to make cinema in painting”.
Two other bodies of work in the show are worth seeking out. Candide is a series of black-and-white drawings on tracing paper, backlit and presented as luminous boxes. They capture ordinary, fleeting moments that would otherwise vanish without trace. And excerpts from Search for the New Land, the video work shown at the Centre Pompidou after Carole Benzaken’s Prix Marcel Duchamp win in 2004, appear here in dialogue with paintings made across the full arc of her career, sharpening both.
Courtesy Ville de Cannes
The jazz framework goes beyond the decorative framing. The artist has spoken of first understanding jazz properly in Los Angeles, grasping how musicians improvise on a standard, how variation and structure hold each other in productive tension. That understanding is now built into the very architecture of the show. And Cannes, with its history of hosting great international jazz artists, can relate. A pictorial, cinematographic Jam Session not to be missed!
VISITOR INFORMATION
Carole Benzaken exhibition Jam Session | La Malmaison, Cannes | Runs through 21 June 2026
Admission €6.50 (reduced rates available)
Opening Hours: Closed Mondays; open 10 am to 1 pm and 2 pm to 6 pm Tuesday to Sunday
VENUE DETAILS
La Malmaison
47 boulevard de la Croisette
06400 Cannes
Tel: +33 (0)4 97 06 45 21
PHOTO CREDITS
- All photos and images courtesy Ville de Cannes
- Lead image © David Bordes
- All other images and video as credited
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