YOEL BENHARROUCHE- THE MUSIC OF PAINTING

MUSIC AND SYNESTHESIA IN YOEL BENHARROUCHE’S PAINTING

Yoel Benharrouche’s art looks like the sound of your favorite song. It has the complexity and nostalgia of an old symphony, and the vibrancy and currency of a modern pop song. His figures and shapes, backgrounds, and colors blend together like notes do when integrated by a master composer. Yoel, in turn, is a master of his canvas, flawlessly combining eternal ideals with the human, mortal, earthly, and physical.

One of the great joys of looking at a Benharrouche is the synesthesia of color and sound, where music blends into shape and form to create art that is music. Benharrouche’s figures make up the elements of his musical instruments, they dance to the music created by these instruments, and it draws the figures closer to each other, themselves, and the audience. Yoel’s “A MUSIQUE EST BELLE” features two women, characterized by the cellos that make up their figures, and bound together through music. Their blue faces gaze into each other’s eyes and create a love song, the soft blues a sighing melody, and the curved, twisted lines a gripping crescendo.

His “CANDEUR CELESTE” features an elegant ballerina figure and a cello, she tiptoes to the soft tune of the strings, carefully setting her feet down to the music. All the music in this painting comes from the color, while the tune follows the dancer and the cello, who dance faintly and gracefully in the foreground. Similarly, in “A L’ECOUTE DES VIBRATIONS PROFUNDES DE L’ETRE” there is only one figure and her cello. The artist explores music and the self in a moving depiction of a figure clutching her cello. The curves of the figure’s body could trick a viewer into thinking that the figure in the painting is one with the cello, that the cello’s curves are an extension of the body’s. In this way, Yoel explains, music is a part of us. We do not know where it begins or where it ends, we know only that it is part of us, that we must use it, and that it is art.