Keren Benbenisty on the Map of Tender
Map of Tender (Carte de Tendre), Circa 1654-61, French, Attributed to Catherine de Rambouillet and François Chauveau as part of Madeleine de Scudéry's novel Clélie.
My first encounter with the Carte de Tendre – a 17th-century map of an imaginary landscape whose lakes, rivers, oceans, and towns depict the complex and manifold aspects of love – changed how I look at territory and transformed my relationship with my work. The Carte de Tendre introduced me to the possibility that maps could depict imaginary, rather than existing, lands, oceans and space.
The Carte de Tendre altered my sense of what space can be. It shifted my understanding from a static, physical concept to a dynamic, emotional reality. The sea was no longer just a body of water but a dangerous void. The land of indifference was not that far from the land of love. Places were no longer just geographical locations; they were charged with feelings.
My ongoing project, This is the Color of My Dreams, is a two-part installation that began as a series of flags, initially created as props for a video work. I intended to document the action of replacing national flags with my flag drawings on top of the Rockefeller Archeology Museum in East Jerusalem. However, my request was denied. Undeterred, I decided to create a map for the flags. It had to be an imaginary map, as no real place would have agreed to replace their national flags, even for a temporary artistic gesture.
Keren Benbenisty, This is the Color of My Dreams, 2015, Orange peels mounted on archival digital inkjet print, 33 x 43 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Ulterior Gallery, New York
My imaginary map is based on a database of 113 poetically (imagined) named commercial blue colors and their commercial codes indicating each flag. The color of the orange peels, placed according to the names, now indicating places, will most likely change over time and eventually disintegrate.
The invented names of synthetic colors reference the world of plants, insects and minerals and add the magic of artifice. Roland Barthes claimed to buy colors according to the “mere sight of their name… is then a promise of a pleasure, the program of an operation.”
Joan Miro, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, 1925, The Metropolitan Museum
The work’s title, This is the Color of My Dreams, alludes to Joan Miro’s surrealist painting Photo: Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves (Photo: This the color of my dreams), which emphasizes the contradictory confrontation between image and word. Carte de Tendre, another surreal place, encouraged me to look at my complex relationship with the place of birth I left.
In this time of war and violence, I pulled out Carte de Tendre to question again: what do our maps seek to shape? What do they envision? And how can their visions reshape our territories and emotions?
Keren Benbenisty was born in Israel (1977), moved to Paris in 1998, graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2004 and attended California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) as an international exchange scholar. She moved to New York City in 2011, where she is currently based. She has been artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine; ISCP – The International Studio & Curatorial Program, NY; Residency Unlimited, NY ; Arts Maebashi, Japan; Open Sessions, The Drawing Center, NY; Artport, Israel; Air351, Portugal; The Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain, Belgium.
