BIOGRAPHY OF YOURI :
Born in Paris in 1988, Youri Visser-Benazeraf lives and works in Berlin.
Youri left the school system at the age of 13 after his father, founding president of a multinational corporation, plunged his family into absolute financial misery due to his fight (which began in the 80s/90s) against corruption and cartels on a global scale.
It is in this context of chaos that Youri begins to create with almost nothing (bits of cloth or rope) – this being his only means of expression. The accumulation of the debts, the seizures, and the hunger explain his obsession with reparation. It is because he has lost everything that he has to rebuild everything, even imperfectly.
Youri considers his past as a strong legacy and remains very independent and driven by this desire to “repair” everything. He continues to refine his technique and his work stays essentially in the vein of post-minimalism and arte povera.
STATEMENT FOR THE SUBMITTED SERIE "NOBLE MATERIALS"The serie “Noble Materials” is a search towards the deconstruction of color and its connection with the canvas.
It involves bonding extremely simple materials such as rope, untransformed cotton cloth, and pure pigment.
At the border of conceptual art and strict minimalism, the finality of this serie is to reduce and divide into precise sequences all the movements in order to erase the superfluous agitation and “noise” that could harm the components of the work.
Youri assembles the frame, stretches the canvas and applies his own mixture of a specifically created medium that doesn’t grind the light of the pigment. The rope, with the use of a stitching mouvement, allows him to make the connection between the painted surface and the canvas.
About the painted surface, Youri is searching for the weights of colours for each canvas, which provoque a different composition and balance for each one of them.
All the elements are visible to the observer, the wood of the frame in transparency of the cotton cloth, the pure pigment and the natural rope. At the end, all the conceptual and visual steps are interconnected and the observer’s view is manipulated to be minimilised.
Nothing remains but the colour’s density.
More broadly, the conceptual work of Youri comes from the idea of clumsy repair exercised in a repetitive way in order to give the art piece a depth of soul.
Youri already exhibited during the Arte Laguna Prize 2013/2014 with the art piece "Here it is Mister Fontana, I fixed it!".
He is now represented by the Amelie Gallery in Paris. 
