MILESTONE
10.2019 · Ben & Julia
Two practices, one room
Milestone belongs to the founding period of Mauer Gallery. The exhibition brought Ben & Julia’s individual and shared visual languages into the same space, combining character based painting, graphic abstraction, installation and the beginning of a gallery programme that would continue to move freely between disciplines.
Benoit Créac’h’s sausage men and inward looking characters sat beside Julia Gaudard’s bold geometric figures. The contrast was part of the energy of the show: different approaches to character, colour and interior worlds sharing the same room without being flattened into one style.
Characters looking back at the room
The exhibition was built around looking. Faces, figures and repeated graphic forms confronted the viewer directly, while visitors themselves became part of the installation as they moved between works. This photograph of a figure facing Julia’s paintings captures that relationship particularly well.
The paintings were never treated as isolated objects. Their scale, spacing and proximity created exchanges across the walls, letting one image change the reading of the next.
Humour, interiority and graphic force
Benoit’s figures already carried the closed eyes, exaggerated noses and inward psychological space that would become central to his later mixed media work. Julia’s images brought a different kind of directness through colour, symmetry and highly controlled graphic form.
Seen together, the works established an early Mauer language: accessible at first glance, visually strong, but built from personal mythologies, mental images and a serious commitment to making.
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