by Benjamin L. Aman, we are faced with an impossible measurement of the time of the night, of the sorgue – which designated the night in the slang of peasants in the Middle Ages – even of darkness. We are at the edge of the cliff in the falling night, unless it is at the time of the first light of day. Wrapped in the veil of twilight or in that of the ghosts of dawn. We are before the infinite extension of a horizon that barely wavers, in a constant and indeterminate vibration between appearance and disappearance. Between the advent of day and its drying up. The tenuous possibility of the space of a landscape is maintained in the depopulation of time.

A light from black or dark matter. In a minimalist and delicate posture that I would like to compare with Robert Ryman, light, its presence, and even rather its immanence is a central question in the work of the artist, in his practice of drawing and his installations. This dark matter and all the subtleties of its shades, sometimes combined with another equally vibrating color, such as a deep oceanic blue, this matter remains ethereal despite its peat, its tint of volcanic earth. It undeniably rustles in contact with natural light. Velvety black, pastel. Slightly metallic silky black, graphite. The cavernous sensuality of these two favorite materials of Benjamin L. Aman awakens an irresistible metaphor of the very faint constellation, Berenice's Hair.

There is no stabilized image in an appearance. There is no pegged image to the paper backing. And yet, I am not in front of the void, but in an intimate relationship that is woven with these horizons. An image can emerge at the end of the Cliff or beyond, if only my own inner visions. In these open spaces, which we can experience just as much listening to the sound work as in an installation by the artist, all sorts of pensive, meditative wanderings augur well, no doubt because they aspire to a pure sensation, a stretched boundary between the spectrum of light and the fall of time.

   Juliette Fontaine (2019)