Benoit

Benoît (pseudonym of Jonkheer Benoît Thierry Marcel Marie Ghislain van Innis) was a Belgian artist, born in Bruges in 1960 and passed away in Brussels in 2024. He was a cartoonist and painter, and studied painting at Sint-Lucas in Ghent under the guidance of Dan Van Severen. In his drawings, he often satirized bourgeois hypocrisy and pseudo-intellectualism. From the press: “Benoît is best known for his simple yet intriguing cartoons published in national and international newspapers and magazines. He regularly contributes to The New Yorker, the renowned American weekly featuring cartoons by some of the world’s most celebrated artists in the field. Less known is that he also paints, in a style unmistakably related to his drawings, but with a pronounced sense of composition, spatial division, and use of color,” and “The paintings from his early period are abstract and strict in design; they already show his preference for expressing emotions through color fields. At a later stage, the interplay between drawn cartoons, pastels, watercolors, and paintings became more intense, although anecdotal elements in his painting were often reduced to a minimum, allowing the true painterly qualities to prevail, such as composition and bold color contrasts.” He is mentioned in the Lexicon of West Flemish visual artists I and in Two Centuries of Signatures of Belgian Artists. (Piron,BT)