During a visit to the French Riviera, MARGOT VII discovered Carole Benzaken's Jam Session exhibition, organized by the City of Cannes and presented at the La Malmaison Art Center. Located opposite the Croisette, this cultural institution hosts a vibrant and immersive experience where painting unfolds like an open musical score. Between abstraction and fragments of images, the exhibition invites a sensory experience where the gaze wanders freely, much like a musical improvisation.


Painting as Improvisation

With Jam Session, Carole Benzaken envisions an exhibition conceived as a visual performance. The title evokes those moments of collective improvisation characteristic of jazz, when musicians respond to one another, experiment, and together construct a composition in motion. In her works, the artist proceeds through successive layers: cut-out images, fragmented photographs, brushstrokes, and colored lines overlap to form vibrant surfaces. The compositions appear both structured and spontaneous, as if each gesture extends the previous one. The viewer's gaze then glides along these dynamic lines, captivated by visual rhythms reminiscent of both music and film editing.



A Dialogue Between Image and Painting

For several years, Carole Benzaken has been exploring the relationship between painting and contemporary images. Photographs, landscape fragments, visual memories, and abstract motifs intertwine to create a new pictorial narrative. In Jam Session, these elements sometimes seem to disappear beneath layers of paint before reappearing elsewhere in the composition. This interplay of revelation and erasure produces a sensation of perpetual movement. The works thus become spaces of visual memory: they capture moments, impressions, and fragments of the world, recomposed within a new temporality.



An Immersive Experience at La Malmaison

Presented at the La Malmaison Art Center, the exhibition takes advantage of the venue's luminous architecture to display works that engage in a dialogue with the space. The exhibition invites visitors to move around, approach, and then step back, in order to grasp the multiple layers of interpretation in the paintings. Up close, the paint reveals the artist's gestures; from a distance, the compositions become almost kinetic. For MARGOT VII, the visit transforms into a true visual exploration, where each room offers a different atmosphere, oscillating between chromatic energy and moments of contemplation.


A major figure in contemporary painting

A renowned artist on the French scene, Carole Benzaken has been developing a practice since the 1990s that questions the links between painting, photography, and perception. Her work is part of a constant exploration of the image: how can painting absorb the visual flows of the contemporary world? How can movement, memory, and sensation be translated onto a pictorial surface? With Jam Session, the artist offers a response that is both free and sensitive, where painting becomes a space for experimentation and dialogue between images.



An exhibition to discover until June 2026

Presented from February 20 to June 21, 2026, the Jam Session exhibition is part of the cultural program of the city of Cannes and confirms the role of the La Malmaison Art Center as a key venue for contemporary art on the French Riviera. A rare opportunity to immerse oneself in the pictorial world of Carole Benzaken, where painting, rhythm, and visual memory meet in a composition as free as a jam session.