Yaniss Beni was born in Paris, to French, Polish and Algerian parents, and grew up in its suburbs. He came to images through analogue photography, and then through acrylic painting.

He painted in layers. Each one covered the last without cancelling it, so that a finished surface held its own history rather than a final state. He treated a canvas as something alive rather than something to be finished: it changed for as long as he kept returning to it, it took on whatever surrounded it while it was being made, and what it became was never quite what he had decided.

He has since lived in seven countries. Paint and film travel badly. The material accumulates, dries, takes up room, and ends up in storage. Working digitally answered that before it answered anything else.

It turned out to do what the painting had done. Since 2023 a piece begins as a written armature, a block of words that is technical, descriptive, functional and poetic at once. He reworks it the way he reworked a canvas, opening it up, taking things away, returning to one edge and leaving the rest. Generations accumulate in layers. Older model versions are kept alongside recent ones, because they make errors the newer ones no longer make and those errors are wanted. Models trained on his own paintings and photographs are brought in case by case. Some pieces are animated, at an amplitude so low that the movement is barely visible. Nothing is made in one pass.

The question that came out of this, of how anything holds a form without settling into one, took him to the physics of systems that hold together only for as long as something keeps passing through them. His current body of work, Far from Equilibrium (2026), is built around three regimes, three conditions under which a form maintains itself without hardening or dissolving. It follows Les Corps Inquiets (2025), a series set in interwar Paris, which also exists as a screenplay written in the structure of a silent film.

The prints are produced in the French Basque Country, on Japanese paper, as unique pieces. He lives in Copenhagen.

108.4, 2015

Acrylic on linen

Past memories, 2012

Gelatin silver print, 30 × 40 cm

Yaniss Beni

Yaniss Beni was born in Paris, to French, Polish and Algerian parents, and grew up in its suburbs. He came to images through analogue photography, and then through acrylic painting.

He painted in layers. Each one covered the last without cancelling it, so that a finished surface held its own history rather than a final state. He treated a canvas as something alive rather than something to be finished: it changed for as long as he kept returning to it, it took on whatever surrounded it while it was being made, and what it became was never quite what he had decided.

He has since lived in seven countries. Paint and film travel badly. The material accumulates, dries, takes up room, and ends up in storage. Working digitally answered that before it answered anything else.

It turned out to do what the painting had done. Since 2023 a piece begins as a written armature, a block of words that is technical, descriptive, functional and poetic at once. He reworks it the way he reworked a canvas, opening it up, taking things away, returning to one edge and leaving the rest. Generations accumulate in layers. Older model versions are kept alongside recent ones, because they make errors the newer ones no longer make and those errors are wanted. Models trained on his own paintings and photographs are brought in case by case. Some pieces are animated, at an amplitude so low that the movement is barely visible. Nothing is made in one pass.

The question that came out of this, of how anything holds a form without settling into one, took him to the physics of systems that hold together only for as long as something keeps passing through them. His current body of work, Far from Equilibrium (2026), is built around three regimes, three conditions under which a form maintains itself without hardening or dissolving. It follows Les Corps Inquiets (2025), a series set in interwar Paris, which also exists as a screenplay written in the structure of a silent film.

The prints are produced in the French Basque Country, on Japanese paper, as unique pieces. He lives in Copenhagen.

108.4, 2015

Acrylic on linen

Gelatin silver print, 30 × 40 cm

Past memories, 2012

Not currently represented.

Group Exhibitions
2024 Accelerate Art, Miami, December
2024 Espai(b), Barcelona, July to September
2024 Eternal Peace, K-Haus, Basel, May
2024 Truth Unveiled, Colonna Contemporary, Wayne, Pennsylvania, March

Solo Exhibition
2012 Pictorial Photography, Gallery Knoth and Kruger, Berlin, June to July

Awards
2025 Art Crush, Australia. Selected for screen exhibition in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.

Collections
Private collections, France, United Kingdom, Spain

Based in Copenhagen. Production in the French Basque Country.

yanissbeni@protonmail.com
Instagram @yanissbeni

Installation view, 2025

Private residence, France